Almost fifty years later, another Gujarati company did the same with the internet, and went much further. In early 2016, a gigabyte of mobile data cost Indians about ₹228, which is why most of us saved our videos for the office Wi-Fi. Jio launched that September with free calls and data, and by 2025 that cost had fallen to ₹7.9. Today, ₹228 buys about 29 GB, more than the average Indian uses in a month.

Where Nirma stayed the affordable choice, Jio has done what few businesses built on low prices rarely manage: raised prices while adding customers.

It now serves 52 crore Indians, carries 60% of the country’s mobile data and earned ₹30,049 crore in net profit in FY26.

On 21 October, the people who made that possible will finally get to own a piece of it, at ₹1,065-1,119 a share. At ₹30,213 crore, it is set to be India’s largest IPO. Unusually, no existing shareholder is selling. Meta, Google and the other investors who bought in at ₹488 a share during the 2020 lockdown are staying put.

Almost every reader of this newsletter has a Jio number in the family. But how many have looked at the business behind it? With the IPO days away, let’s examine what Jio owns, how it makes money, what the price implies and the risks to weigh before bidding.

In this edition

• What exactly is Jio Platforms?
• How did Jio turn a price war into a profit machine?
• Why is Jio raising money if it’s already profitable?
• What are you really paying for: a telco or a tech platform? 
• What to weigh before you bid

What exactly is Jio Platforms?

Most of us encounter Jio several times a day. We recharge on MyJio, watch cricket on JioHotstar, order groceries on JioMart and fill up at a Jio-bp pump, so it is natural to assume this IPO lets you buy into all of it.

Most of these, however, belong to other parts of the Reliance group: JioMart is run by Reliance Retail, JioHotstar by Reliance’s media business, and Jio Finance is already listed separately. Jio’s own offer document lists JioHotstar and Jio Financial Services as “third-party” services alongside Google and Microsoft, and even the Jio name belongs to RIL, which licenses it to Jio Platforms royalty-free.

What Jio Platforms owns is everything underneath. At its base is technology it built itself, from the network to the software running it. On top sits the connectivity we know: 52.4 crore mobile customers (26.9 crore on 5G) and home broadband reaching 2.7 crore homes, more than any other provider. It also earns beyond the SIM through MyJio, JioSaavn, JioTV+ and cloud, IoT and security services for businesses.

The shareholder list shows how many large global investors have already backed this business. Reliance owns 66.43% of Jio Platforms. Meta and Google hold close to 18% together, with the rest spread across KKR, Silver Lake, Saudi Arabia’s PIF, ADIA, Mubadala and other global funds that invested in 2020.

Behind every mobile network is telecom spectrum: the radio frequencies that carry phone signals. Your home Wi-Fi works the same way. Most routers use 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz frequencies. One reaches the far bedroom; the other is faster but struggles through a wall or two.

Mobile networks face the same trade-off. Some frequencies travel farther and pass through walls but carry less data; others carry more over shorter distances. The government owns this spectrum and leases it to telecom companies through auctions, usually for 20 years, and they pay for it in instalments, much like an EMI. Jio holds about 45% of all spectrum held by India’s telecom operators, against Airtel’s 38%. It leads in three of the four frequency ranges, and its leases still have 16 years left on average.

Customers can switch networks within days, but no rival can quickly match that much spectrum or a network built over ten years. Buying into this IPO is like buying a toll road on India’s mobile traffic with sixteen years left on the lease. 

How did Jio turn a price war into a profit machine?

In March 2016, India had about ten mobile operators fighting over the same customers. Within three years, most had disappeared: Reliance Communications, Aircel and Videocon went into insolvency; Telenor and Tata Teleservices sold to Airtel; and Vodafone and Idea merged to survive. Today, just four operators remain, with three holding almost the entire market.

That matters more than any single number in Jio’s accounts. In a market with ten players, the company that raises prices first hands customers to its rivals. In a market with three, a price hike is usually matched within days, which is exactly what happened in July 2024 when Jio raised tariffs and Airtel and Vodafone Idea followed. The price war made later price hikes possible.

All of this has made Jio one of the largest businesses in the country. In FY26, it earned ₹1.47 lakh crore in revenue and ₹30,049 crore in profit, keeping about ₹20 of every ₹100 billed. The company says no Indian business has reached this scale within ten years of starting out, despite competing with two established rivals.

The average Jio customer now pays nearly a fifth more each month than two years ago. Yet Jio added 3.6 crore customers in the same period. Mobile data has become as essential as electricity: a bill people grumble about but keep paying. Warren Buffett calls pricing power the most important thing to look for in a business, and the last two years are Jio’s clearest evidence that it has some.

The picture isn’t entirely one-sided, though. In the nine months after the July 2024 hike, Airtel’s customer base grew about 2%, while Jio’s slipped slightly. Airtel also earns ₹257 per customer each month, against Jio’s ₹214, suggesting that users willing to pay more for quality have tended to choose Airtel.

The second change is how much cash Jio keeps after building its network. A telecom network is a lot like the toll road: the years of construction swallow money, and the returns only arrive once the road is open. Jio spent much of the last decade building 4G and then 5G. Two years ago, it kept less than ₹3 of every ₹100 in operating profit after network spending. Today, it keeps about ₹55.

That shift turns a profitable company into a cash-generating one, and it is the main reason Jio can now cut debt, invest in AI and list from a position of strength. The one caution is that telecom harvests rarely last forever. The move from 4G to 5G came within six years, and the next cycle, whether 6G or the data centres AI will need, will eventually ask for another round of construction.

Why is Jio raising money if it’s already profitable?

India’s two largest IPOs before Jio had something in common. When Hyundai listed its Indian business in October 2024, every rupee of the ₹27,870 crore it raised went to its parent in Seoul. LG Electronics did the same a year later. LIC’s IPO involved the government selling its stake, while Paytm and Tata Capital, the other two in the top five, also involved existing owners selling shares.

Jio’s IPO works differently. No existing shareholder is selling, including Meta, Google and KKR, which invested at ₹488 a share in 2020 and stand to more than double their money at the IPO price. Jio is issuing 27 crore new shares, about 3% of the company, with almost all proceeds going towards debt repayment.

Those loans are in US dollars and Japanese yen, borrowed at interest rates as low as 1.4%.  Repaying cheap money early saves very little interest. What it mostly does is reduce currency risk, since the rupee has weakened from about 83 to 95 against the dollar in two years, and every fall makes these loans costlier to repay.

Jio’s IPO is less about raising money and more about unlocking value for Reliance. Jio makes up nearly half of RIL’s worth, but that value isn’t fully reflected in RIL’s share price. A separate listing makes Jio’s value visible and gives Meta, Google and other investors a way to sell their stakes.

Whether the price is fair depends on the yardstick. Jio trades at about 34 times last year’s earnings, against Airtel’s 42. But on the measure that also accounts for debt and spectrum dues, Jio is more expensive. Nomura and Motilal Oswal argue that Airtel, with higher revenue per customer and better returns on capital, deserves no discount to Jio.Several brokerages do value Jio a little above the IPO price, but their numbers rely on tariffs rising again soon. 

Then there is supply and demand. With only 3% on offer, shares will be scarce in the first few weeks, and demand is being encouraged too. According to Bloomberg, Reliance has urged its 4.2 lakh employees, and their families, to open demat accounts and consider bidding. The group also paid October salaries about 15 days early, just days before the issue opens. Staff weren’t told why, but the timing is hard to miss. Scarcity and a motivated crowd tend to lift prices on listing day.

That changes six months later, when the pre-IPO investors, who together own about a third of the company, are free to sell. They may well hold on, but anyone bidding should know the small float doesn’t last.

What are you really paying for: a telco or a tech platform? 

In 1920, Henry Ford ruled the American car market. His Model T was cheap, reliable and available in more or less one design. Ford kept cutting prices to make it affordable to more families. Over at General Motors, Alfred Sloan took a different approach, offering “a car for every purse and purpose,” from basic models to stylish ones for buyers willing to pay more. In 1927, GM overtook Ford and stayed ahead for most of the next century.

Making cars cheap got America on the road. Ford’s mistake was assuming customers would always want the cheapest option. Once most families owned a car, growth came from those willing to pay for something better.

Jio has reached a similar point. Its customer base is expected to grow about 5% a year, while revenue per customer is expected to grow nearly twice as fast. Indians pay ~₹7.9 a gigabyte against roughly ₹240 in the US, leaving room for prices to rise. Almost all of Jio’s future growth depends on earning more from customers it has already signed up.

Three things could drive that growth. About 26 crore Indians still use basic 2G phones, and upgrading to smartphones brings higher spending. Only one in five Indian homes has fixed broadband, leaving room for Jio to expand its lead. Then there are the apps, cloud and AI tools that could make Jio a technology platform rather than just a phone company.

That last part is where I would be most careful. Prepaid mobile plans alone bring in 77% of Jio’s revenue, and most of its digital services are bundled into them to keep customers loyal. Google AI Pro, for example, is free for 18 months on Jio’s 5G plans, and streaming comes with recharges. These make plans more attractive but don’t yet generate a separate revenue stream.

AI, which features heavily in Jio’s pitch, works the same way. Jio’s own AI mostly runs behind the scenes, keeping the network cheaper to operate. Customer-facing AI, such as Google’s assistant and the business tools Reliance is building with Meta, comes through another group company, Reliance Intelligence, with Jio as distributor. For now, AI is something Jio delivers rather than owns.

At today’s price, the market is valuing Jio as a technology platform while it still earns like a telecom company. It must retain its mass market while getting customers to spend more. If it succeeds, today’s price could look reasonable in hindsight. If digital services never become a meaningful business, investors will have paid a technology price for a telecom company.

What should you weigh before bidding for Jio?

In November 1996, Germany sold shares in its state telephone company, Deutsche Telekom, to the public. Marketed as the Volksaktie, or “people’s share,” the issue was oversubscribed five times.

By March 2000, the shares had climbed sevenfold, and many families bought more at four times the original price in a later offering. Then the dot-com bubble burst, and by 2001 the shares had fallen below where they started. For many Germans, it was a lasting lesson: knowing a company as a customer is different from knowing it as an investor.

Jio is not Deutsche Telekom. It is profitable, it leads its market, and it isn’t listing at the top of a bubble. But the lesson stands: familiarity can make us skip the homework. These are the risks I’d weigh before bidding.

1. It depends heavily on Reliance. Reliance Retail sells the prepaid plans that generate most of Jio’s revenue, while Reliance also builds much of its network and runs its data centres. RIL owns the Jio name and can withdraw it if it loses control, leaving minority shareholders dependent on decisions made elsewhere in the group.
   
2. It owes more than the headline debt suggests. Jio still owes the government about ₹1 lakh crore in spectrum instalments, separate from the debt figure it highlights.
   
3. Recent profits are flattered in places. Interest costs nearly doubled last year as 5G began being charged to the accounts, while returns on capital slipped. Motilal Oswal also points out that part of last year’s cash came from paying almost no tax, which won’t continue indefinitely.
   
4. Its future depends on the government. The state auctions spectrum, Jio’s telecom licence comes up for renewal in 2033, and regulators can constrain future tariff increases.
   
5. It pays no dividends. Jio has never paid one, so shareholder returns depend entirely on the share price.

Jio may well turn out to be a very good investment. It deserves the same scrutiny you would give any business you had never heard of, and perhaps a little more, precisely because it feels so familiar.

Disclaimer: Investment in the securities market is subject to market risks, read all the related documents carefully before investing. The information contained in this document is for general purposes only and is not a complete disclosure of every material fact, terms and conditions. The information provided herein is intended solely for educational purposes. All trademarks, logos, and brand names mentioned are used for identification purposes only.  In the preparation of this document, Dezerv has used publicly available information and other sources believed to be reliable. While reasonable care has been taken to present reliable data in this document, Dezerv does not guarantee the accuracy or completeness of the data. Distribution services are offered through Dezerv Distribution Services Private Limited vide AMFI registration no. 248439 and APMI registration no. 00615.

India depended heavily on imported oil, so it felt the impact quickly. The import bill began to swell at a time when the country was already in political turmoil, and by July the Janata government had fallen.

Then the monsoon failed. The rains, that summer, came in nearly 19% below normal. Crops withered across large parts of the country, and by the following spring drought was affecting 220 million people. In the 1980 Budget, the Finance Minister had to tell Parliament that prices had risen by 20% in a single year.

It’s easy to think of that as distant history. But this year, almost the same sequence played out again.

At the end of February 2026, strikes on Iran shut the Strait of Hormuz, the passage that carries about half of India’s crude oil. Within a month, the price India pays for a barrel of crude jumped from $69 to $126. Then, at the end of September 2026, a strong El Niño left the monsoon 12.6% below normal, the weakest in more than a decade.

The difference is that India went into this crisis much better prepared. Inflation was at its lowest in years, which gave the government room to soften the blow, and for a few months it looked as though most Indians would hardly notice the shock.

That didn’t last. The cost of oil has spread into fertiliser, food and airfares, the weak monsoon has pushed food prices higher, and by August retail inflation had climbed to 4.82%. On 7 October 2026, the RBI raised the repo rate from 5.25% to 5.5%, its first hike in more than three and a half years.

And the coming months matter more than the ones behind us. Inflation is still climbing, El Niño is expected to last into January 2027, and the RBI has ruled out rate cuts for now. In today’s newsletter, I’ll break down what’s pushing prices up, where the pressure is showing first, and what it means for your loans, savings and investments, so you know what’s happening at home and around the world before the pressure builds further.

In this edition:

• Why India’s inflation stayed low for months, and why that is changing now
• How expensive oil moved from the petrol pump to everything else
• Why food prices are rising from two directions
• What the RBI’s first rate hike since 2023 means for your money
  

Why India’s inflation stayed low for months, and why that is changing now

When the Strait of Hormuz closed, most people expected Indian prices to jump within weeks. India imports almost 90% of its crude, and about half of it comes through that one route. Yet as crude nearly doubled, retail inflation in March 2026 barely moved, and transport, the part of the budget most exposed to fuel, saw no price rise at all.

Part of the reason is where India started from. Through 2025, falling food and fuel prices pushed inflation to its lowest in more than 25 years, and the RBI spent the year cutting rates. Few large economies went into this war with that much room.

The rest came from decisions most people may have not noticed. The government cut excise duty on petrol and diesel, rationed natural gas to keep fertiliser plants supplied, and waived customs duty on petrochemical inputs, while state-run oil companies held pump prices and absorbed the losses. India was among a few countries, along with China, Korea and Hungary, where such steps, helped by low food prices, kept inflation in check through March and April 2026.

That protection came at a cost. It widens the government’s fiscal deficit and leaves less room for other spending. The rupee took some of the strain too, hitting a record low against the dollar and making every imported barrel costlier. What these measures really did was buy time. A cost shock like this moves slowly from factories to shop shelves, usually over more than a year, so in March most of it was still on its way.

You can already see the cushion wearing off. Transport, flat in March 2026 and April 2026, was up 4.6% by August, and restaurant prices are now more than 8% higher than a year ago. Personal care looks like the fastest riser at around 15%, but that mostly reflects gold and silver jewellery, not everyday spending.

And more is still in the pipeline. What businesses pay for fuel, metals and raw materials is rising about twice as fast as what we pay in shops.

When businesses’ costs rise faster than the prices they charge, someone has to absorb the difference. For now, it is mostly companies, taking it out of their own profits. That rarely lasts, and sooner or later those costs reach the prices we pay. That is why I believe the peak of this inflation is still ahead of us.

How expensive oil moved from the petrol pump to everything else

Most of us think of an oil shock in terms of the petrol pump, because that’s the price we see change. But crude oil is also where a long list of everyday things begins, many of which have nothing to do with petrol: the plastic around our groceries, the polyester in our clothes, and the fertiliser on the farms that grow our food.

When crude rises, the increase grows at every step. Crude becomes naphtha, naphtha becomes the chemicals behind polyester and plastics, and each business passes its higher costs to the next. If the full cost were passed on, prices would rise across almost 9 out of 10 product categories in India.

Air travel is the most exposed, since fuel is an airline’s biggest cost, and fares could rise by close to a quarter. Clothing gets costlier through synthetic fibre, and furniture, appliances and packaging through plastics. Services that depend more on people than fuel, like education and phone/internet plans, are hit the least. Food is a different case altogether, and I’ll come to it in the next section.

Where you are in the world also matters. By mid-year, petrol prices across emerging Asia had risen about twice as much as in Latin America, because more than 80% of the oil and gas passing through Hormuz is headed for Asia.

Expensive oil also changes where the world’s money goes. In the US, petrol prices have nearly doubled since January 2026, pushing inflation back up, and the 10-year US government bond now pays about 5%, the most since 2007. When the safest investment in the world pays that much, global investors demand more from markets like India. Over two years, foreign investors have sold $56 billion of Indian shares, wiping out eight years of buying.

India is far from alone, and its share of the outflow from emerging Asia is small next to Korea and Taiwan. What has kept our markets steady is Indian investors, who put $177 billion into shares over the same period, more than three times what foreigners took out.

The world also has a thinner cushion now. Global oil stocks, including America’s emergency reserve, have fallen to about 711 million barrels, from around 1.2 billion in 2017, so any new disruption could push prices up quickly. So expensive oil is hurting us in two ways at once. It is pushing up the prices we pay for everyday things, and it is pulling foreign money out of Indian markets.

Why food prices are rising from two directions

For most of India’s history, food prices have depended on one thing above all: the monsoon. A good one keeps granaries full and prices steady; a weak one reaches every kitchen within months. This year, food is being squeezed by both the monsoon and oil, making the pressure harder to manage.

The first squeeze comes through fertiliser. Crude oil adds less than 0.2% to fertiliser costs directly. But once you add the gas, chemicals and transport needed to make it, fertiliser ends up nearly 18% costlier. Farmers responded by using less: sales of urea, DAP and potash fell sharply between April and July 2026, just as the kharif crop was being sown.

The second squeeze is El Niño, a warming of the Pacific Ocean that weakens the winds carrying monsoon rain to India. This year’s El Niño is unusually strong, and the monsoon ended 12.6% below normal, the weakest since 2015, with the east and northeast 26% short. Rice, sugarcane, soybean, maize and arhar dal have all been hit.

The two problems make each other worse. Less fertiliser and rain means lower crop yields. Low reservoirs also mean less hydropower, forcing more coal use to keep the lights on and pushing energy costs higher.

Households are already feeling it. Food and beverages inflation rose to 5.66% in August 2026, from almost nothing a year ago, and even a home-cooked thali costs noticeably more, driven by cooking gas and edible oil. The government has cut import duties on edible oils and sugar to ease prices.

Companies are feeling it as well. Consumer staples are one of only two sectors expected to report lower profits for the July–September 2026 quarter. Globally, food prices hit their highest since November 2022 in August 2026, and fertiliser prices are expected to rise about 26% this year.

What concerns me most is how long this could last. El Niño is expected to continue into January 2027, putting the winter wheat and mustard crop at risk. After the failed monsoon of 2009, food inflation climbed to around 17% and stayed in double digits well into the following year.

Food makes up more than a third of the average Indian household’s spending. That is why I believe that even if oil eases, food could keep inflation high well into 2027.

Through 2025, anyone with a home loan got used to good news, as rate cuts brought EMIs down. On 7 October 2026, that ended. The RBI raised the repo rate from 5.25% to 5.5%, shifted its stance from “neutral” to “calibrated tightening”, and made clear that cuts are off the table while inflation heads towards 6% this quarter. India is not alone: around the world, inflation has stopped falling and central banks are raising rates again.

Borrowers see the impact first. On a ₹3 crore home loan, this one hike adds more than ₹55,000 a year, and if inflation stays high, it may not be the last.

Savers feel it later, which in my experience makes it more dangerous. A 6.5% FD feels safe, but in the highest tax bracket it earns around 4% after tax, less than prices are rising. Your deposit grows, but what it can buy shrinks.

Economists call this money illusion: we judge our wealth by the number we see, not what it can actually buy. India has also removed indexation, which let investors adjust gains for inflation before paying tax, first for debt funds and later for property and gold. So in a year like this, you may end up paying tax on gains that are really just inflation.

There is another side to inflation that gets far less attention. When prices rise, company revenues rise with them. Revenues of India’s top 500 listed companies grew nearly 20% last quarter, with profits up 14.2%. Analysts, who usually lower their profit forecasts as the year goes on, are raising them in 2026, something that has happened only twice since 2011.

Yet share prices have moved the other way. Two years ago, the Nifty traded at about 25 times expected earnings. Today, it is closer to 18 times, even as earnings improve. This is where recency bias comes in. After two flat years, it’s easy to judge the market by its recent past, and moving money to deposits feels natural, even though those are the assets that inflation and tax erode the fastest.

In 1979, India had very little to protect itself with. This time, the economy went in well prepared, and three quick checks can make sure your finances are too:

1. Check when your home loan rate resets, and whether prepaying part of it from idle cash makes sense.
2. Compare the post-tax return on any FDs maturing soon with where prices are heading.
3. Rebalance if your portfolio mix has drifted from your goals.

Phases like this pass, and the investors who come through them best are usually the ones who make these checks early.

DISCLAIMER: The information provided herein is intended solely for educational and informational purposes. In the preparation of this document, Dezerv has used publicly available information and other sources believed to be reliable. While reasonable care has been taken to present reliable data in this document, Dezerv does not guarantee the accuracy or completeness of the data.

Of the 286 employees who sat down with him, 79 (28%) agreed to raise their savings immediately. The other 207 gave the answer that most of us would give, which was to try again some other time.

The consultant then made those 207 employees a different offer. They did not have to change anything that day. The next time they received a pay rise, 3 percentage points of their salary would go into their retirement account, and the same would happen at each rise after that until they reached the limit of the plan.

Of the 207, 162 (78%) accepted, even though they had just refused to save more. Forty months and four pay rises later, their average savings rate had climbed from 3.5% to 13.6%. The 79 who had agreed to save more at once began at 4.4%, jumped to 9.1%, and finished at 8.8%.

The economists behind the offer, Richard Thaler (Nobel laureate, 2017) and Shlomo Benartzi, called it Save More Tomorrow. It is usually filed under nudges, but I think it is better understood as an older and simpler idea, the if-then plan. If I receive a pay rise, then 3 percentage points of my salary go towards my future. Nobody needed willpower on payday, because the decision had been made earlier, on a calm day.

Most investors I meet begin with excellent intentions. They want to put their capital to work sensibly, to be patient with it, and to avoid the mistakes they have watched others make. The intention is rarely the problem. The trouble begins when the intention meets a real market, and the mind starts to interfere.

Behavioural economists have named the main culprits. Loss aversion makes a fall in value feel heavier than an equivalent gain feels pleasant. Recency bias persuades us that whatever happened over the last year will carry on happening. Present bias makes later feel cheaper than now, which is why 207 employees said some other time. Overconfidence convinces us that we can tell a temporary dip from a genuine problem. None of these reflects a lack of intelligence, and each of them tends to appear when a decision has to be made under stress.

The SIP is India’s most popular attempt to work around this problem. It automates the intention, because the money leaves the account every month without anyone having to decide. It automates only the start, however. Nothing in a SIP says what to do on the day the intention weakens, and this edition is about writing that missing rule.

In this edition

• Why a SIP automates the start but not the staying
• Two leaks: quitting in a lull and arriving after a rally
• What an if-then plan is, and where its limits lie
• RULES: five if-then plans you can write this week

A SIP automates the start, but staying is still up to you

In April 2026, for every 100 new SIPs registered, about 101 were stopped or had run their course. That figure is the SIP stoppage ratio, calculated from AMFI’s monthly data, and it stood at 101.14%. Even so, SIP contributions that month were ₹31,115 crore, close to the record.

Both facts can be true because the money comes from a large base of investors who carry on, while a layer of churn beneath them keeps opening and closing accounts. The ratio was 74.8% in January 2026, touched 101.1% in April 2026, and had fallen back to 81.1% by August 2026. Meanwhile the Nifty 50 made little progress: Business Today reported on 8 September that its returns had been flat for two years, and DSP’s Sahil Kapoor said the flat stretch “has largely been a time correction”.

There is one caution. The ratio also counts SIPs that reached the end of their tenure, so it overstates outright quitting, and it is better treated as a gauge of mood than as a headcount of panic. Still, the direction is telling, because the ratio rose and fell while the index itself made no progress.

If you have ever opened your app during a market fall and hovered over the pause button, you have met the missing rule. A SIP automates the decision to invest, but the decision to stop remains one click away, and it tends to be asked on the worst possible day. Half of the decision is automated, and the harder half is left to your mood.

Two leaks, one cause

Investors lose money in two places that look like opposites. One is quitting during a lull, and the other is arriving after a rally. A bias sits behind each of them.

The first leak is costly because of where the best days fall. FundsIndia analysed the Nifty 50 Total Return Index from July 1999 to May 2026. An investment of ₹10 lakh left untouched grew to ₹2.84 crore. Missing only the 10 best days cut the final value by 55%, to ₹1.28 crore, and missing the 15 best days left ₹95 lakh. Those 15 days were a tiny fraction of more than 6,000 trading days.

Timing makes matters worse. Seven of the Nifty’s 10 best days came within two weeks of its 10 worst days. Everyone would like to avoid the worst days, but almost nobody manages to avoid only those, because the recovery does not wait for the investor to feel better. This is loss aversion at work. A SIP also buys more units when prices are lower, so the months in which you most want to cancel are the months in which it is working hardest.

The second leak is the mirror image, and recency bias is behind it. In Dezerv Research on the most popular equity funds, 71% of the money arrived only after the fund had already had its best year, and for sector funds the figure was over 80%. Fear explains the first leak, and envy explains the second. Both show up in the results: about 53% of investor portfolios reviewed on the Dezerv app have underperformed their benchmark.

Neither leak says much about intelligence. Most of the investors I meet run businesses or large teams, and they would never let a hiring decision depend on who happened to be in the room that day, yet their portfolios often run on exactly that basis. Both leaks are reactions to the last few months. The goal that most of us carry, to invest for the long run, gives no instruction to either. A goal names a destination, but it says nothing about what to do at the junction where you will be tempted to turn.

What an if-then plan is, and where its limits lie

In 1997, the psychologists Peter Gollwitzer and Verena Brandstätter asked students to write, within two days of Christmas Eve, a report on how they had spent it. Some of the students were also asked to decide exactly when and where they would write the report. About three quarters of that group finished it, compared with about a third of the students who had made no plan.

Gollwitzer calls this an implementation intention. A goal says, “I intend to reach X.” An implementation intention says, “When situation X arises, I will do Y.” It ties a specific cue to a specific response, so that the response begins with far less deliberation when the cue appears. The decision moves from the moment of stress to a day when you are calm. Airline pilots work the same way: they do not improvise after an engine failure, because the checklist begins with a cue and the response is already written.

Now apply that to your portfolio. “I will stay invested for the long run” is the Christmas report without a time and place. “If the Nifty falls 10% from its peak, I will change nothing for 30 days” is the same intention with both.

Save More Tomorrow fits the mould exactly. The cue is a pay rise, and the response is a rise of 3 percentage points in the savings rate. Because each increase was tied to a pay rise, the pay that people received never went down, and nobody had to decide anything on payday, when the extra money already feels like theirs. The chart shows what followed: the group that began with the lowest savings rate finished with the highest.

The research has limits, and they are worth knowing. The effect is moderate, and it is strongest when the person already wants the goal and has rehearsed the plan. Most of the evidence comes from health, study habits and everyday tasks, and I am not aware of a test on Indian SIP investors, so the fit is an informed bet.

RULES: five if-then plans for an investor

Each letter of RULES marks a moment that tends to go wrong: Rally, Underperformer, Lull, Extra cash, and Shock. Every rule has four parts: a cue that can be checked, a single action, one exception that is named in advance, and the bias that the rule is designed to counter. The thresholds below are examples, so replace them with numbers that suit your portfolio and your temperament.

The rules do not all fire at the same time. Lull and Shock stay on throughout the year, Underperformer and the SIP step-up in Extra cash arrive with the new financial year, and Rally and any windfall wait for an event. Writing down when each one fires tells you when to look at it and, just as usefully, when to leave it alone.

Rule E has the most measurable payoff, so here is the arithmetic. A SIP of ₹50,000 a month for 15 years, at an assumed return of 12% a year, grows to about ₹2.36 crore from ₹90 lakh invested. If the SIP rises by 10% every April, the same assumption gives about ₹4.10 crore from ₹1.91 crore invested. April marks the start of the financial year, so the cue arrives on its own.

There is, however, a catch. The step-up asks for more money, and by year 15 the SIP would be about ₹1.9 lakh a month, so check that the increase fits your income before you commit to it. A rule that you cannot afford will be the first one you break.

A rule is only as good as its wording, so test each one against four questions before you adopt it.

When you are ready, put the rules on one page. The sheet below has room for a cue, an action, an exception, and a rehearsal date, and it is worth showing to one other person, such as a partner, a chartered accountant, or your portfolio manager, so that somebody can ask whether today is a rule day.

Do not write all five rules in one sitting. Pick the leak that has cost you most over the last two years, write one rule for it, and rehearse it once. To rehearse, read the rule aloud while picturing the day it triggers: the red screen, the family WhatsApp group, and the colleague who has just sold. Then say the response. Add the next rule only after the first has survived a bad month, and review the whole set once a year on a date fixed in advance. Rules will occasionally be broken. When that happens, record what triggered it and restart at the next review date. A rule that you rewrite in the middle of a fall has become a mood.

Go back to 1998. The 162 employees who joined Save More Tomorrow did not become more disciplined people between the meeting and the fourth pay rise. Someone asked them, on a calm day, what they wanted their future selves to do on payday, and they agreed on an answer.

You will not be the same person on the day the market falls. On that day you will be more anxious than you are now, and just as sure that you are being sensible. Write the instructions while you are calm.

Following a rule on the day you would rather not is the hard part, and it is also a large part of the job that a portfolio manager does for clients.

Disclaimer:

Investment in the securities market is subject to market risks. Read all related documents carefully before investing. The information provided herein is intended solely for educational purposes and should not be construed as solicitation, advertising, investment advice, financial advice, or an offer to buy or sell any financial instruments. The information contained herein is for general purposes only and is not a complete disclosure of every material fact, terms and conditions. Past performance is not indicative of future returns. Data from public sources is believed to be reliable but has not been independently verified by Dezerv.

Distribution services are offered through Dezerv Distribution Services Private Limited, a wholly owned subsidiary of Dezerv Investments Private Limited (collectively referred to as “Dezerv”) vide AMFI Registration No. (ARN)- 248439 and APMI registration no. (APRN)- 00615.

As more fund houses arrived from the late 1980s, distributors took mutual funds to investors, town by town. They made investing accessible, but the model had two limits: investors paid commissions, and their choices depended on what their local distributor offered. An investor in Banaras or Madurai in the early 2000s could only choose from the funds available through that distributor, often shaped by what paid the distributor best.

SEBI introduced direct plans in 2013, and within a few years investing apps had put them in everyone’s pocket. That solved both problems at once. The investor in Madurai could now buy any fund in the country from his phone, without paying a commission.

It also created a new problem. With 2,000+ schemes a tap away, choosing became harder, and many investors either froze or ended up owning far more funds than they needed. A solution existed, but only for a few. With ₹50 lakh, you could hand your portfolio to a professional portfolio manager, an option used by just over 2 lakh clients in a country with crores of mutual fund investors. For a young, fast-growing country where most people will fund their own retirement, that never made much sense.

On 24 September 2026, SEBI took the next step in a journey that began with US-64. Its board approved PRIM (Portfolio Managers’ Route for Investing in Mutual Fund Units), allowing portfolio managers to manage portfolios made up only of direct mutual fund plans, with the minimum investment halved to ₹25 lakh.

This is deeply personal to me. When we launched our first mutual fund-focused strategy in 2022, the question we heard most was why anyone would pay a portfolio manager to buy funds they could buy themselves. For four years, answering it took a long conversation, and SEBI has now answered it for all of us. PRIM feels like one of the most important steps since US-64, and in this edition, I’ll use facts and data to show why it matters for investors who have built serious wealth through mutual funds.

In this edition:

• Why do investors need PRIM today?
• Why picking the right fund is harder than it looks
• What SEBI has changed
• Why the extra fee can be worth it

Why do investors need PRIM today?

Think about how much work mutual funds have taken off investors’ plates over the last decade. Picking individual stocks means reading annual reports, tracking management and knowing when a business no longer deserves your money. A mutual fund hands all of that to a professional, and Indians have taken to the arrangement with remarkable enthusiasm.

Monthly SIP inflows grew from about ₹3,600 crore in 2017 to a record ₹32,297 crore in August 2026, contributing SIP accounts crossed 10 crore, and mutual fund folios now stand at 28.35 crore. For millions of households, a SIP now leaves the bank account every month with the same regularity as the electricity bill.

Getting mutual fund investing right comes down to four things: access to the right funds, choosing the right ones, deciding how much to invest in each, and rebalancing when needed. Over the last ten years, access to funds has been solved. Choosing them, timing them and staying invested remain the harder parts.

This pattern isn’t unique to investing. When industries break things apart, they often bring them back together in a new way. Music went from albums to individual songs, then back to subscriptions that bundle music with recommendations. Software went from CD suites to separate apps, and now to integrated workspaces.

Investing is somewhere in the middle of that loop. Distributors once controlled access and made products easier to navigate. Then direct plans and apps opened access to everyone. Now, the challenge is deciding what to own, how much to own and when to change course. The cost shows up in churn, panic selling and returns that fall short of what the funds actually earned.

The next step is bringing curation back, and that is what PRIM is designed to do. The last decade made access to funds almost free. The next could be about paying for better management. For investors with large mutual fund portfolios, that shift could matter most.

Why fund picking is harder than it looks

Many investors we meet run businesses or large teams. They can dissect a P&L, challenge a forecast and spot a weak assumption in minutes. Yet many haven’t reviewed their own mutual fund portfolio in over a year, and the funds were often picked because they topped the returns table at the time. It feels sensible to expect a fund that did well for three years to keep delivering, but the data tells a different tale.

As per our research, 1.3 million+ daily observations across fund categories show that only 52% of funds beat their respective benchmarks over rolling one- to five-year periods, barely better than a coin toss. A fund that ranked in the top quartile had only a 25% chance of staying there three years later.

Part of the reason is that the market keeps changing what it rewards. Large caps lead one year, small caps the next and mid caps some other year, so a fund that looked brilliant was often simply in the right segment at the right time. Picking last year’s winning fund usually means betting on last year’s market.

And even a good fund can disappoint if you invest at the wrong time. In the most popular equity funds, 71% of the money was invested only after the fund had delivered its best one-year return. Investors saw those strong past returns and invested, but by then, the big gains had already happened. For sector funds, that figure was over 80%.

Put the two together, and the outcome shouldn’t be surprising. About 53% of investor portfolios reviewed on the Dezerv app have underperformed their benchmark. At ₹25 lakh, these mistakes carry real weight. None of this says much about intelligence. Investors often do what seems rational: buy what has already worked, after it has worked. Avoiding that takes a process that looks beyond last year’s returns, and the time to stick to it, which most successful professionals simply don’t have.

What SEBI has changed

SEBI has always drawn a firm line around portfolio management services, and for good reason. Many PMS strategies invest directly in a concentrated set of 20 to 25 stocks, which can swing far more than a diversified mutual fund. The ₹50 lakh minimum was meant to keep those swings for investors who could absorb them.

A portfolio built entirely from mutual funds carries a very different kind of risk, since each fund is already diversified, run by a regulated AMC and required to disclose its holdings every month. The proposed SEBI (Portfolio Managers) Regulations, 2026, which will replace the 2020 regulations once notified, recognise this through PRIM, a dedicated route with rules suited to that risk rather than rules written for concentrated equity.

This is the kind of thoughtful regulation that makes me proud of India’s markets. Instead of lowering the ₹50 lakh threshold across the board, SEBI surveyed portfolio managers, took public comments on its July draft, and built a route suited to how Indians actually invest today.

PRIM portfolios hold only direct plans, so no distributor commission is built into any fund you own. The fixed management fee is capped at 1% of AUM, though a performance-based fee is also allowed, so ask how a provider’s fees are structured. Exit load provisions are waived, and no more than 25% of your money can go into funds from the manager’s own group, which limits the pull towards in-house products.

SEBI has also made it easier for existing portfolio managers and new entrants, including smaller advisory firms, to offer PRIM. More managers should mean more choice for investors and greater competition on process and results. The separation rules keep that competition clean, since a firm that also distributes mutual funds can’t pitch a commission-based product and a managed portfolio to the same client, unless that client is an accredited investor.

Few regulatory changes benefit every side, but this one comes close. Investors get professional management at direct-plan costs, AMCs keep assets invested for longer, and advisers get a regulated way to be paid for allocation, behaviour and outcomes

The lower ticket size will get the headlines, but the more lasting change is in what a portfolio manager is now paid for. Under PRIM, the fee comes from managing your money well, and no longer from selling you a product. SEBI deserves real credit for getting that incentive right.

Why the extra fee can be worth it

Most people who hire a personal trainer already own running shoes and know how to use a treadmill. What they pay for is someone who builds the right routine, adjusts it as they progress, and makes sure they turn up on the mornings they’d rather stay in bed.

A mutual fund portfolio works the same way, which raises the obvious question: if every fund already charges an expense ratio, why pay a portfolio manager on top?

The answer starts with how much fund choice matters. Invest ₹1 crore in a top-performing fund and, after seven years, it could grow to about ₹3.91 crore. Put it in a poorly performing fund, and you’d have about ₹2.40 crore. Even after a 1% annual fee on the better outcome, you’d still have about ₹3.69 crore, roughly ₹1.29 crore more.

So what does the fee actually pay for? The work that decides your outcome: picking the right funds, setting the right mix for your goals, and knowing when to act or stay put, especially in bad years. Someone has to do that work, whether it’s you, a distributor, an adviser or a portfolio manager, and each route handles it differently.

Good guidance goes beyond recommending funds. PRIM lets a manager do all three through low-cost direct plans, for a fixed fee capped at 1% of AUM. For investors moving from regular plans, that broadly replaces the 0.75-1% distributor commission they already pay, with GST and some operating charges on top, except it now goes to someone accountable for the whole portfolio. Managers may also charge a performance fee, so ask how a provider’s fees are structured.

No portfolio manager can promise top performers, and we’ve seen how rarely last year’s winners repeat, which is why a consistent process matters more than a lucky pick. Every investor pays for mistakes eventually, through a fund that falls behind, a purchase at the peak or a sale in panic. A management fee is the one version of that cost you can see, compare and question upfront

In summary

A decade ago, apps made mutual funds accessible to everyone. With PRIM, professional management now starts at ₹25 lakh, with someone to choose your funds, size the portfolio and rebalance it over time.

At Dezerv, we’ve spent four years evaluating 2,000+ funds every month across 156 variables, holding only 4-9, allocating them around each investor’s goals, risk and time horizon, and rebalancing when needed. It brings discipline to the part of investing that is hardest to do consistently on your own.

The last decade of mutual fund investing was about getting Indians started. The next will be about keeping them invested in the right funds, and for lakhs of investors who have built wealth through SIPs, that is about to get much easier.

Disclaimer: Investment in the securities market is subject to market risks, read all the related documents carefully before investing. The information provided herein is intended solely for educational purposes and should not be construed as solicitation, advertising, or providing any financial or investment advice or an offer to buy or sell any financial instruments. The information contained in this document is for general purposes only and is not a complete disclosure of every material fact, terms and conditions. The information provided herein is intended solely for educational purposes. The information relating to PRIM (Portfolio Managers’ Route for Investing in Mutual Fund Units) is based on the press release on Key decisions taken in the SEBI Board Meeting dated 24th September, 2026 and is yet to be notified. Dezerv Investments Private Limited (DIPL) is a Portfolio Manager with SEBI Registration no. INP000007377. Distribution services are provided by Dezerv Distribution Services Private Limited vide ARN – 248439 and APRN – 00615.  

The easy option was to sell to a larger newspaper chain. Chains like that were buying up small papers across the country, and the money would have been good. But the brothers had watched what happened after those sales, the new owner would cut the newsroom, cut costs, and move on. They didn’t want that for the people who’d spent their careers building the paper with them.

So they asked their lawyer, a man named Louis Kelso, for something that didn’t really exist yet: a way to sell the company to their own employees, even though none of the employees had the money to buy it.

Kelso found a way to make the deal work. A trust was created to buy the brothers’ shares, using a loan. The brothers were paid in full immediately. The employees didn’t personally owe the loan. The trust repaid it over the years using the newspaper’s profits. As the loan was paid off, the shares were transferred from the trust to the employees. Eventually, the employees owned the entire company.

Two years later, Kelso wrote a book arguing that his idea could address a much bigger fear gripping the country. Machines were getting smarter, factories were automating faster, and economists feared workers would lose their bargaining power as businesses needed less labour. Kelso’s argument was blunt: if machines were going to do more of the work, financial security would belong to those who owned them, not just those who operated them. 

Replace “machines” with “AI” and the argument could have appeared in a business paper last week. It was written in 1958. Kelso believed ownership was the one thing that couldn’t be automated out of a person’s hands. Seventy years later, AI is putting pressure on the jobs that once gave young professionals a reliable start. This week, we revisit Kelso’s idea and ask what ownership could mean for an Indian wealth creator today. 

In this edition:

• Where AI is actually hitting jobs right now, 
• AI Is changing work before It changes jobs
• How to build wealth when AI threatens your job
• Why ESOPs Matter for Economic Security in the age of AI
• A simple way to evaluate your own equity, as an asset and not just another bonus

Where AI is actually hitting jobs right now

Coal miners used to carry a caged canary down into the tunnels with them. Canaries breathe faster than humans and need more oxygen per pound of body weight, so if the air turned poisonous, the bird went quiet first, well before the miners were affected. The canary gave them an early warning that something was wrong.

A team of Stanford economists found a similar pattern in US employment data. They studied software developers and customer service workers, two jobs heavily exposed to AI, and tracked employment by age from November 2022, when ChatGPT launched. Among 22-to-25-year-olds, employment in these roles has been falling. Among 35-to-49-year-olds doing the same work, it continued to rise.

They’re calling the younger workers the canaries.

In India, the pressure is showing up earlier in the career ladder. Oracle cut roughly 21,000 jobs globally as it restructured around AI. TCS cut jobs too, but said most of the cuts were in middle and senior grades, not among freshers. The squeeze on younger workers is showing up somewhere else: getting in. Entry-level tech openings in India fell 44% year-on-year to roughly 10,000 roles by June 2026. Infosys’s under-30 workforce share has slipped from 60% three years ago to 51% today.

If AI keeps advancing at its current pace, many of the workers whose jobs are affected will have to find work elsewhere. According to Anthropic, over the next four years, many could move into jobs where AI has a harder time replacing human presence — electricians, nurses and other work that still needs someone physically there. The shift shows up in pay too: workers in these jobs could see wages rise more than 30% above where they would otherwise have been, while knowledge workers whose tasks are easier for AI to automate could see their pay remain flat or fall, even as the broader economy continues to grow.

For a 22-year-old starting out in software, that is a very different future from the one they were preparing for.

AI Is changing work before It changes jobs

Technological shifts have always changed the kind of work people do. In 1800, more than 80% of the US workforce worked on farms. Today, fewer than 2% do. But that transition took generations. AI is being adopted much faster, which raises the possibility that the disruption could happen much faster too. And this time, the workers exposed aren’t just factory workers or farm labourers. They are the “laptop class”, people whose jobs were long considered relatively protected from automation.

AI also affects workers differently depending on their experience. At a large call centre, a generative AI assistant helped novice agents resolve 30% more calls per hour, while the most experienced agents saw almost no improvement. With GitHub Copilot, junior programmers finished tasks 56% faster, while senior engineers saw a much smaller gain. Among writers, ChatGPT narrowed the gap between average and strong work more than it improved the strongest writers. 

Researchers call this the jagged frontier. AI often raises the floor faster than the ceiling. 

Experience used to compound over a long career. The World Economic Forum estimates that the useful life of a professional skill has fallen from 10-15 years a generation ago to under five today, and closer to two years for skills linked to AI. Goldman Sachs estimates that up to 300 million jobs worldwide have meaningful AI exposure. 

Expertise still matters. But 20 years of experience can lose some of its advantage much faster when the tools themselves keep improving. That is why today’s employment numbers may not tell us much about where this ends. Gartner expects one in five organisations to cut more than half their middle-management layers by the end of this year. Whether AI is driving the cuts or simply making them easier to justify, the shape of the workforce is changing.

How to build wealth when AI threatens your job

Two things are true at once, and neither is going away on its own. The people just entering the workforce are the first to feel AI’s effect on hiring. And the people who spent decades building up experience are watching the value of that experience compress faster than it used to. These are different stages of the same problem: income that depends on your labour continuing to be needed is becoming less certain.

There is also a bigger question about who captures the wealth AI creates. Today, roughly 60 cents of every dollar the economy produces goes to labour, while about 40 cents goes to capital. If AI takes on a much larger share of knowledge work, that split could change significantly. In a more aggressive scenario, labour’s share falls from 59.4% to 45.2%. The economy grows. The total pie gets bigger. But workers take home a smaller share of it, while more of the gains accrue to those who own the AI, software and infrastructure behind the growth. 

That may be one of the biggest changes AI brings to work. Your salary pays you for your labour. Ownership gives you a share of the value created by the technology you use.

Kelso was asking the same question in 1956: if machines create more of the wealth, who gets to own them? His answer was workers. It took nearly two decades for that idea to get a formal structure. In 1974, ERISA gave it a legal framework and a name: the Employee Stock Ownership Plan.

Today, ESOPs are often treated as a perk, extra upside if the company does well. But for many employees, they have become a meaningful source of wealth. In India, ESOP wealth now stands at roughly ₹14.2 lakh crore, nearly a quarter of the mutual fund industry’s AUM. And it goes well beyond startups. In 2024, HDFC Bank alone paid out ₹5,282 crore through ESOPs,  more than all Series B+ startups combined.

The same shift is visible in the way multinational companies pay senior employees in India. Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta all use RSUs, restricted stock in their publicly listed parent companies, as a standard part of senior compensation. By 2026, this equity was adding 30-80% to fixed pay at senior levels. 

For professionals, that changes how equity needs to be viewed. When a salary is the dependable part of compensation, equity can feel like a bonus. When the salary itself becomes less certain, ownership starts to matter differently. Equity starts to look less like a bonus and more like insurance.

Why ESOPs Matter for Economic Security in the age of AI

If you joined Nvidia seven years ago as a fresh graduate, you would be worth $1.6 million today. A 22-year-old joining in 2019 could be 29 now, and already a millionaire. Not from generational wealth, not from a lottery ticket, not from starting a company. Just an engineering job, and the discipline to hold onto the stock.

That’s what makes ESOPs so powerful. I like to think of it as Economic Security through Ownership and Participation. Your salary pays you for the work you do. Your equity gives you a piece of the company you’re helping build. If the company grows 10x, your salary probably won’t. Your equity can. 

For most people, economic security depends on their ability to keep earning. Lose the job, and the income stops. If the value of your skills falls, your earning power can fall with it. But economic security also comes from owning productive assets, not just from selling labour.

That becomes important when technology changes how much labour a business needs. AI could allow a coder, analyst, designer or researcher to produce far more in the same amount of time. Companies may need fewer people even as they become more productive. Owning part of that company gives employees another way to participate in the wealth being created.

There is also a practical benefit. Imagine spending eight years at a company and accumulating meaningful equity. If your role disappears in year nine, you may still need another job. But if that equity has become valuable and you can sell it, you don’t have to start again financially. You have time — to take a break, retrain, start a business, invest, or choose a job that pays less because you have more freedom.

That is what ownership can ultimately buy you: the ability to say no. Of course, an ESOP only creates that security if the equity actually works. Ten thousand options can sound like a fortune until you realise they represent 0.005% of the company. What matters is what you own, what you pay for it, dilution, vesting and whether there is a realistic path to liquidity.

There is a trade-off too. Taking less cash for equity can make sense, but not at the cost of money you need today. So don’t just ask how many ESOPs you’re getting. Ask what could those options eventually do for your financial life?

A simple way to evaluate your equity, as an asset and not just a bonus

In 2002, more than 50 million people already owned a digital camera, and digital camera sales overtook film for the first time. Kodak had seen it coming: its own engineers had built the first digital camera decades earlier. Yet Kodak stock was still in the top third of the S&P 500. Anyone holding it had every reason to feel secure. Four years later, the stock had lost 90% of its value. By 2012, Kodak was in bankruptcy.

Nobody’s equity needs to be tied to a company as dramatic as Kodak for the same lesson to apply. Equity doesn’t automatically protect you. It only becomes insurance once you understand what you actually own and what could affect its value. There’s a simple way to check that, starting with the parts of your grant letter that determine what your equity is actually worth:

A Dezerv survey of 800+ ESOP holders found that even among those with over ₹1 crore in equity value, 94% couldn’t identify the most important document in their grant, and fewer than half could calculate their vesting correctly. The details can change what your equity is worth: your vesting schedule, exercise window, strike price and dilution all affect what you eventually keep.

I’ve tried to put all of this in one place in The Millionaire Employee, so you don’t have to piece it together from scattered blogs, HR documents and random advice. It covers the things I think every employee should know before treating equity as part of their wealth.

The more uncertain work becomes, the more important it becomes to have something of your own on the other side of the paycheque. 

Disclaimer: The information provided herein is intended solely for educational and informational purposes. Investment in the securities market is subject to market risks, read all the related documents carefully before investing. In the preparation of this document, Dezerv has used publicly available information and other sources believed to be reliable. Readers are advised to consult with their financial advisor before making investment decisions based on the information provided herein. The information provided in this document has not been independently verified by Dezerv and are subject to change. All trademarks, logos, and brand names mentioned are used for identification purposes only.

They did. The warehouse experiment became HYROX. Within a few years, it was running in 30 countries and attracting over 550,000 participants a year. Most came to test themselves and finish the race, rather than compete for a win.

India got its first taste of HYROX in 2025, and the response was telling. When HYROX opened 15,000 slots for its Mumbai event this year, every category — Singles, Doubles, Relay and Pro — sold out within eight days. Entry alone for the event costs up to ₹9,000 a person, well above what most participatory fitness events in India charge. There’s no prize money for most participants, and no sponsorship waiting for them. What sells out is the chance to race against the clock, in public, and get a number that shows exactly how you performed.

It’s a strange thing to see at scale, especially in a country where gym membership sits at just 0.8% of the population, among the lowest rates of any major economy. The US is at 25% and China at 3%. Yet India’s affluent are increasingly willing to pay a premium to test themselves in front of an audience. That contradiction, and what it says about how India’s wealthiest are choosing to spend their time and money, is what this week’s newsletter is about.

In this edition:

• What India’s fitness economy actually looks like 
• Why HYROX is more than a fitness race 
• From HYROX to Ironman: the rise of endurance as a luxury
• What it really costs to get race-ready
• Why has physical suffering become a new status symbol?

What India’s fitness economy actually looks like

The more I look at India’s fitness numbers, the more I think this isn’t really a story about the country getting fitter. It’s a story about where fitness has chosen to take root first, and it’s telling us something worth paying attention to about how new habits actually spread in India.

Deloitte estimates India’s fitness facility market at ₹16,200 crore in 2024, growing to ₹37,700 crore by 2030 at around 15% a year. But the growth is concentrated in a few cities. Ten cities account for 56% of revenue but those same ten cities hold only 31% of the country’s fitness centres. The rest of India has plenty of gyms and fitness centres, but fewer people who can or want to pay for them. This is typical of a market that is still growing, led by cities with higher incomes, greater exposure to fitness, and busier lifestyles.

What I find more interesting is where the growth is happening within the market. Boutique fitness is the smallest segment by revenue, but it is growing the fastest. These premium formats, including HIIT and functional training, typically cost ~₹19,000-₹30,000 a year, with brands like Cult.fit Studios and F45 expanding across Bengaluru and Mumbai. The segment is growing at nearly 19% a year through 2030. Premium fitness follows at 16%, while the value segment, which still has the largest base of members and centres, is growing at 14%.

None of this means fitness is failing to reach the rest of India. It means the culture is being shaped first by people with the money, time and interest to experiment, before those habits spread more widely, as many consumer trends in India do. Overall fitness membership is still just 0.8% of the population, and is expected to reach only 1.7% by 2030. That makes this less a question of affordability and more an early stage in a much bigger shift in how India adopts fitness at scale.

Why HYROX is more than a fitness race 

For most of India’s history, wealth meant never having to lift anything heavy again, the cook, the driver, the household help all standing in for the physical effort you no longer had to do yourself. Somewhere in the last five years, that idea flipped on its head, and nowhere is it more visible than in a fitness race that most of India hadn’t heard of eighteen months ago.

That race is HYROX, and it didn’t exist in this country until last year. In April, 8,200 people paid to push sleds and carry sandbags at the Bangalore International Exhibition Centre, with another 12,000 turning up just to watch, and for weeks afterward, every feed seemed to carry someone’s finish time like a badge worth showing off.

What that tells me is that the real audience for an event like this was never just the 12,000 people who paid to stand in that hall. It’s the thousands more who see it on social media days later. A HYROX finish photo on Instagram gives people something worth signalling: you were there, you did it, and here’s exactly how long it took. Your finish time becomes a number you can post, share and compare. That may also be why a format with no prize money can still sell out in days. 

It’s the latest point in a growth story that has surprised almost everyone in the sport. HYROX had 1,650 participants at its Mumbai debut in May 2025. Two months later, Delhi drew 2,300, followed by 3,350 in Mumbai that September. Then Bengaluru brought in 8,200 this April, nearly five times Mumbai’s first event in less than a year. Globally, participation is expected to rise from 900,000 in 2025 to 2 million this year. India has quickly become one of HYROX’s fastest-growing markets.

None of this is India’s first experience with fitness as an event rather than a habit. Marathons gave urban professionals a finish line and a sense of identity. CrossFit later gave the same crowd a community and a routine to build around. Both found their strongest following among affluent circles in Bengaluru and Mumbai, before the novelty began to fade. HYROX has reached this audience much faster. That raises a fair question: is it simply the next fitness trend, or is there something about the format that could make it last?

My own reading leans toward the latter, and the reason has less to do with sleds and sandbags than with the business sitting underneath them. Unlike marathons or CrossFit boxes, which mostly ran on community and local ownership, HYROX arrives fully built as a commercial product, ticket revenue, a global licensing model, an official title partner in Ultrahuman, a PUMA deal, a layer of intermediaries between every participant and the finish line they’re paying for. 

That’s a very different machine from what came before. It may be why HYROX has grown faster and reached more people than previous fitness events in India. The question now is whether people keep coming back for a harder attempt, or move on to the next big fitness trend.

From HYROX to Ironman: the rise of endurance as a luxury

There’s a particular kind of Goa trip that’s become common among people who could easily spend the weekend at a five-star resort, by the pool or on the beach. Instead, they fly in on Thursday, spend Friday and Saturday getting their bikes ready, and on Sunday morning, well before sunrise, swim 1.9 kilometres in the Arabian Sea off Miramar Beach, cycle 90 kilometres through Goa’s back roads, and finish with a half marathon back where they started. That’s the appeal of Ironman 70.3 Goa: a 70.3-mile triathlon covering a 1.9-kilometre swim, 90-kilometre cycle and half marathon, all completed back to back in a single day, with a finisher’s medal waiting at the end.

The race is now in its fifth edition since Yoska brought it to India in 2019, and the arc since then tells you plenty about who this is really for. Close to 4,000 people have taken it on across those editions, drawn from more than 57 countries, and more than 65% of finishers in the first four editions were attempting the distance for the very first time in their lives. An individual entry costs around ~₹35,000 to ~₹45,000, before flights, hotels and a bike. Yet demand remains strong. The latest edition saw nearly 1,200 registrations from 75+ cities.

What I find interesting is who’s shown up to do it. A sitting Member of Parliament completed the race in 2024, becoming the first MP to do so. A 66-year-old triathlete, seven years into retirement from a corporate career in Singapore, was preparing for his 14th attempt. And Leander Paes joined as the race ambassador. Together, they show how the race has grown beyond a fitness challenge into a serious test of endurance.

The comparison with HYROX is useful because they offer different levels of challenge to the same audience. HYROX can be done with a few months of training and a weekend trip. Ironman 70.3 demands far more time, training and money, but also gives you a bigger story to take home. If HYROX is the entry point, Ironman 70.3 Goa is the next level.

What it really costs to get race-ready

Every finish-line photo from a HYROX or Ironman hides a less visible number: the months of preparation behind it. Most of that preparation is paid for by the hour, and almost none of it makes it into the photo.

A personal trainer in Mumbai or Bengaluru typically costs ₹500-₹2,000 a session. At premium studios, it can go much higher. Top gyms in Bengaluru charge around ₹1,500 an hour for certified trainers, along with facilities such as Peloton bikes, infrared saunas and cryotherapy chambers. Memberships can cost ₹3,000-₹10,000 a month, before personal training. Some studios also offer DEXA scans, giving detailed body-composition data that was once mostly available through hospitals. Put it all together, and the race entry fee starts to look small compared with what it costs to get to the starting line.

This is the part of the fitness economy that conversations about HYROX and Ironman often miss. A race happens once or twice a year and makes for a great photo. A ₹1,500-an-hour trainer, twice a week for eight months, does not. But that’s where much of the spending actually happens.

So even before travel or gear enters the picture, the training alone can cost several times more than the race entry fee.

Why has physical suffering become a new status symbol?

Wealth used to be easiest to show through what you owned: a bigger car, a bigger house, a holiday somewhere most people couldn’t point to on a map. But that signal has become weaker as more people can afford the same things. The finish time is different. You can pay for the race, the bike and the coach, but you still have to earn the result through months of training. The same is true of a resting heart rate or a sleep score. They offer something money can’t easily buy: proof of discipline.

The gym is no longer the only place where this plays out. Weekend cycling groups, pickleball courts and run clubs that end with matcha and croissants have become part of urban India’s social life. Even the workout itself has become social. Apps like Strava let you post your runs, compare your pace with friends, and collect the little trophies of consistency along the way. The more interesting shift is what happens when that same behaviour moves from everyday exercise to a formal event.

The wearable is simply the next layer of the same story. Sleep scores, HRV and biological age turn the body itself into a dashboard. You can spend money on the coach, the race and the device, but the numbers still have to be earned. And perhaps that is why physical suffering has become such an attractive status symbol: in a world where almost everything can be bought, the things that still have to be worked for become more interesting to show.

Disclaimer: The information provided herein is intended solely for educational and informational purposes. In the preparation of this document, Dezerv has used publicly available information and other sources believed to be reliable. The information provided in this document has not been independently verified by Dezerv and are subject to change.  All trademarks, logos, and brand names mentioned are used for identification purposes only.

Nothing scared her, because a rare genetic condition had destroyed both sides of her amygdala, the part of the brain that processes fear and pushes you to avoid danger.

But the rest of us still have that part intact, and it doesn’t only fire for knives and haunted houses. It fires for anything tedious, boring, or vaguely anxiety-inducing too, a tax form, an insurance renewal, updating a nomination on a mutual fund. The amygdala flags the task as a threat, using much of the same circuitry S.M. was missing, and pushes the brain toward avoidance instead of action. 

Here’s why that matters even more as you get wealthier. Building wealth doesn’t just give you more money. It also gives you more things to manage: more accounts, more paperwork, and more decisions to make. And all of this comes at a time when your time is becoming more valuable. So the very thing wealth is supposed to make easier can sometimes get harder to manage. You may put off looking at an investment or making a financial decision simply because your brain tends to avoid things that feel complicated, unfamiliar, or demanding.

This newsletter looks at what that avoidance can cost you, what science tells us about the link between wealth and happiness, and how to find the right balance between the two.

In this edition

1. The happiness ranking of everyday life                   
2. How to use money to buy back the time you keep giving away
3. What should you spend more money on?
4. Building your happiness allocation

There’s a number in the research on happiness that I find more useful than almost any debate about whether money makes people happy : -2.45. 

Behavioural data tracking mood against daily activities shows that financial, household, and administrative tasks carry a happiness coefficient of -2.45. That puts admin right alongside being sick in bed, at the very bottom of daily human experience, worse than commuting, worse than most chores anyone complains about.

Unlike a strained relationship or a health scare, which no amount of money can touch, admin is one of the few things on the bad end of that list that money actually can remove. And yet it’s usually the thing that expands, not shrinks, as a person does better financially. Think about what sits inside that category. Paying bills. Sorting paperwork. Coordinating household help. Chasing a plumber. Booking appointments. Comparing vendors. Filing documents. Dealing with the small things that somehow multiply when you’re not looking.

None of these activities are catastrophic and that’s exactly what makes them dangerous. They take hundreds of hours a year and give almost nothing back. 

A Swedish economist, Staffan Linder saw a version of this problem more than fifty years ago and called it the harried leisure class. His argument was simple: as your income rises, your time becomes more valuable. And once your time feels valuable, you start trying to squeeze more out of every minute. Even leisure becomes something to optimise. The swimming pool you bought to relax becomes something you have to maintain. The farmhouse becomes another property to manage. The holiday becomes 18 WhatsApp groups, three spreadsheets and a calendar.

You have more money. But somehow, less life. And this is where I think wealth creation gets misunderstood. The point of becoming wealthier isn’t just to afford better things. It’s to stop spending your best hours on things that make your life worse.

Researchers who have tracked people’s activities and moods repeatedly find that some of the highest-rated parts of a day are remarkably ordinary: spending time with people you love, exercising, being outdoors, intimacy, engaging experiences. 

And near the bottom? Work, Admin, Commuting, and Waiting. Yet these are exactly the things many successful people continue to do themselves. That doesn’t make sense. If you have enough money to pay someone ₹2,000 to solve a problem that you would otherwise spend two hours solving yourself, the question isn’t whether you can afford ₹2,000. But whether your two hours are worth more to you than ₹2,000.

How to use money to buy back the time you keep giving away

This is where money can do something genuinely useful. It can make taxing parts of your life disappear. A cook doesn’t just make dinner. They remove grocery shopping, chopping, cleaning and planning from your week. A driver doesn’t just move you from A to B. They turn a commute into an hour where you can read, call your parents, stare out of the window or simply do nothing. An assistant doesn’t just book appointments. They remove the dozens of tiny decisions that sit behind them. A good CA doesn’t just file your taxes. They remove the mental load of remembering what needs to be done. 

All this has become increasingly relevant in urban India.  Groceries arrive in minutes, a plumber comes to your door, and a cab is a few taps away. Quick commerce alone is now a multi-billion-dollar industry. Trading money for time has become part of everyday life. 

And that’s actually a good thing. A Harvard study of 6,000+ people across several countries, including millionaires, found that people who spend money to save time tend to be more satisfied with their lives, across income levels. This is why I think we should stop looking at these expenses as lifestyle inflation. Sometimes they’re not. Sometimes they’re time investments.

Do a simple test: Does this purchase give me something? Or Does this purchase take something away. The second question is often more valuable. If something consistently drains you and money can remove it, remove it.

But there’s a catch. 

Buying back time doesn’t automatically make you happier. Because we are very good at filling empty space, a concept called time confetti. The 45 minutes you save by skipping the supermarket rarely comes back as 45 uninterrupted minutes. It gets scattered across Instagram, messages and email until it’s gone.

Then there’s the autonomy paradox: tools that give us more control over our time can also make us feel obliged to fill it with more work. You save an hour, only to find another hour of work to put in its place. You haven’t really bought back time. You’ve just created capacity for more work. So there’s a second rule to follow: Never buy back time without deciding what you’re buying it back for.

If the answer is “I’ll get more work done”, that’s fine if that’s genuinely what you want. But don’t tell yourself you’re spending money to improve your life when you’re really spending it to fit another task into the day.

Once you’ve removed the things that make your life worse, there’s a second job for money: create more of what makes your life better. This is where spending gets interesting.

A friend of mine got his first big ESOP payout after his startup was acquired last year. Within a week, most of it had gone into mutual funds and retirement funds. But months later, the thing he still talked about wasn’t any of that. It was flying his three closest college friends to Goa on his own dime, no occasion, no ask, just because he finally could. That trip cost him money. But it bought something he couldn’t have bought in quite the same way before: a memory that four people still talk about.

And there’s a genuine physiological reward wired into helping other people or giving to someone else, and it isn’t a small or occasional effect. Helping or giving, when it’s freely chosen, activates the brain’s reward system much like receiving money yourself. Regular giving is also linked to better mood and health, with the effects lasting far longer than the quick high of buying something for yourself aka helper’s high. 

Spending and happiness points in a similar direction: money tends to work better when it buys time, experiences, relationships and generosity, rather than simply more stuff.

We spend a lot of time thinking about the allocation of our investment portfolio. How much in equity? How much in debt? How many alternatives? How much liquidity? It might be worth doing the same exercise with your life. Take everything that occupies your time and put it through two questions: Does it make my life better or worse? Can money change it?

That gives you four boxes.

The top-left box is where I think wealthy people often leave the most money on the table. They have the ability to remove things that make their lives worse, but they keep doing them because they’re used to doing them. They’ll spend ₹2 crore upgrading a house and hesitate to spend ₹50,000 a year on something that would give them back 200 hours.

That’s backwards. The return on money isn’t always a thing you can point to. Sometimes it’s an hour that never gets wasted.

And that’s probably the most useful way to think about wealth and happiness. Don’t ask yourself: “What can I buy now that I couldn’t afford before?” Ask: “What part of my life can I stop doing now that I couldn’t stop doing before?” Then ask: “What do I want more of now that I finally have the money to buy it?”

That’s what wealth is for. 

Disclaimer:The information provided herein is intended solely for educational and informational purposes. The information contained in this document is for general purposes only and is not a complete disclosure of every material fact, term or condition. In the preparation of this document, Dezerv has used publicly available information and other sources believed to be reliable. The information provided in this document has not been independently verified by Dezerv and are subject to change.

One, a die-hard Delhi loyalist, went on about the winters, the food, the sheer scale of the city, and how everything important in the country eventually passes through it. Another, who’s spent her career in Mumbai, talked about the sea, the energy, the hustle, and how every other Indian city feels slower by comparison. The third, a Bengaluru transplant like me, had his own case: the weather, the pubs, the tech money, and the feeling that the city still feels young and full of possibility.

I grew up in Mumbai and moved to Bengaluru a few years ago, one of several cities Dezerv is based in, because that’s where I chose to lead from. It wasn’t necessarily the weather that brought me here. It was the work, the talent, and the energy of building something new.

The thing about “which city is better” debates is that nobody is really wrong. Each of my friends was optimising for something real: the Delhi fan for scale and centrality, the Mumbai friend for pace and ambition, and the Bengaluru guy for opportunity and youthful energy. They were simply choosing differently.

But personal preference only takes you so far. To know how well a city actually works, you need a different lens. Every year, the Economist Intelligence Unit ranks 173 cities on healthcare, education, infrastructure, stability and everyday life. No Indian city comes close to the top: Delhi ranks 120th, with Mumbai, Chennai and Bengaluru trailing behind. Given the wealth, talent and ambition concentrated in these cities, that deserves a closer look.

So this week, we’re asking a different question: not which city is best to build a career or wealth in, but which is best to live in, once you strip away reputation, opportunity, and loyalty, and just look at the numbers.

In this edition:

• What actually makes a city “liveable” 
• Beyond jobs and salaries: India’s most liveable cities
• What this means for your next big location decision
• How a few Indian cities and villages are already cracking it

What actually makes a city “liveable”

Strip away the GDP numbers and skyline photographs, and every city is judged on five things:  Stability (25%), Culture & Environment (25%), Healthcare (20%), Infrastructure (20%), and Education (10%). Together, these cover everything from safety and air quality to healthcare, transport, housing, and schools. Each is weighted differently, and together they produce a single score out of 100.

Copenhagen leads the 2026 index with 98.2, posting perfect 100s in education, infrastructure, and stability.

Now, the real difference between Copenhagen and Delhi isn’t money. It’s who is responsible for getting things done. Copenhagen has one empowered local authority overseeing transport, land use and infrastructure. That makes long-term projects, like its 400 km network of protected cycling lanes, easier to plan and actually complete.

Delhi has no equivalent authority. Roads, water, transport and planning are split across the MCD, NDMC, DDA, PWD, Delhi Jal Board and Delhi Traffic Police, with different agencies reporting to the Centre or the Delhi government. No one owns the outcome. 

Yet Delhi scores 58.9 for infrastructure, largely because of the Metro, which worked because it was built through a single, insulated authority. Mumbai scores just 51.8 despite one of the world’s busiest urban rail systems, because its railways operate largely separately from the city’s roads, buses and housing authorities. Improving one system doesn’t necessarily improve the others.

Healthcare runs into the same problem. Copenhagen, Zurich and Geneva treat it as a universal system, with broad access and consistent standards. Delhi and Mumbai both score just 41.7. Both have some of India’s best private hospitals, but the EIU measures whether ordinary people can access and afford care, not whether excellent care exists for those who can pay. That makes this less a hospital problem than a system problem.

Culture & Environment is where India’s biggest cities struggle most. Delhi scores 35.4 and Mumbai 33.3, far below the global average. That’s striking for cities celebrated for their food, festivals, architecture and diversity. But the EIU’s environment score comes down to basics: air quality, waste and drainage. In Delhi, courts repeatedly step in over pollution and flooding because no single civic authority owns the problem.

Education is where both cities fare better. Delhi scores 66.7 and Mumbai 58.3, their strongest scores apart from stability. That’s partly because education has fewer overlapping authorities: state departments and school boards largely run the system.

The contrast is telling: when responsibility is clear, cities perform better; when it is split across agencies, performance suffers.

Beyond jobs and salaries: India’s most liveable cities

Every year, a Bengaluru techie complains about traffic, a Delhi executive about the air, and a Mumbai banker about rent. Yet all three stay. That loyalty says something: people put up with expensive, difficult cities because that’s where the money and opportunity are.

But step outside that emotional pull, and 23 Indian cities purely on the data, and a different set of winners emerges – cities largely absent from those group-chat rants. A cost-of-living versus quality-of-life map of 23 Indian cities makes the split clear, sorting them into four categories: Bad Value, Best Value, Premium Life, and Budget Living. And India’s biggest economic powerhouses cluster heavily in Bad Value.

It isn’t that these cities aren’t building. India has gotten genuinely good at infrastructure that gets ribbon-cuttings and headlines: metros, airports, expressways and digital payments, all at remarkable speed. It is far worse at the unglamorous, recurring work that rarely makes headlines: collecting trash, treating sewage, maintaining drains, keeping things clean after the cameras leave. The first is visible and politically rewarding. The second is invisible until it fails, and thankless even when it works.

Mumbai epitomises this divide. The city just opened the Aqua Line, an impressive metro extension that would be a point of pride in most global cities. Yet Mumbai is surrounded on three sides by water, with beaches lined with garbage and a coastline largely unusable because sewage and waste aren’t properly collected or treated. The same mismatch shows up in what residents pay versus what they get. Take property prices, for instance.

Mumbai’s Property Price-to-Income ratio, 30.1, is the highest of any city by a wide margin, nearly double Delhi’s and more than six times Hyderabad’s. It captures what the Cost of Living index misses: groceries and transport aren’t dramatically more expensive, but buying a home takes years of income that few other Indian cities demand.

Residents pay that premium for economic opportunity and improving transit. What they get back, a Pollution score of 83.1 and Traffic Commute score of 55.0, both among the worst here, is the daily cost of living in the city.

Delhi carries the same imbalance differently. Its Property Price-to-Income ratio of 16 is high but far below Mumbai’s, while its Purchasing Power is stronger than Kolkata’s and Jaipur’s. What drags it to the bottom is Pollution and Safety, both the worst in the country. Neither of those improves by building something new. They require the less glamorous work of controlling emissions, maintaining drainage and enforcing traffic rules, consistently.

Bengaluru is almost the inverse story. Its incomes are among the strongest in the country, proof that its economic engine works. But traffic and pollution are close to Delhi’s because civic investment hasn’t kept pace with its growth. The city grew faster than its roads, drainage and basic infrastructure could handle.

Hyderabad has one of the healthiest Property Price-to-Income ratios, partly because it hasn’t yet seen the population surge that overwhelmed Delhi and Mumbai. That’s an advantage today, but also a warning: many cities now in “Bad Value” once looked like this, before population outpaced infrastructure.

Coimbatore, Jaipur and Surat benefit from the same mathematics of scale. Smaller populations mean less pressure on traffic, waste and water systems, making it easier to stay clean and safe. Some are genuinely well run, but part of their advantage is simply having fewer people to serve.

What this means for your next big location decision

Everything in this newsletter has been building toward one question: given all of this, what should you actually do with it? The honest answer is that no single city is “the best.” The right one depends on what you’re optimising for right now, and that changes with age, family, career and how much wealth you’ve already built.

Here’s a simple framework to help you make that choice.

If your city doesn’t fit your current stage, that’s not automatically a problem. Just be clear about what you’re trading for it, and whether that trade still makes sense. This table covers only 13 cities, and there are many more worth comparing. If yours isn’t here, you can run the same comparison yourself in under a minute: search for your city’s Quality of Life page and compare it with another city here 

How a few Indian cities and villages are already cracking it

None of this means India needs to import someone else’s model of how a city should run. It already has working examples at home, many of them overlooked. Indore has been India’s cleanest city for eight straight years, not through a foreign template but through door-to-door waste collection, strict source segregation, and citizens who actually participate in the system rather than merely tolerating it.

Mawlynnong, in Meghalaya, has long been known as Asia’s cleanest village, sustained largely through community discipline rather than government enforcement. Punsari, in Gujarat, gave residents streetlights, CCTV, Wi-Fi and clean water years before many Indian towns, funded through local revenue rather than waiting for state or central grants.

The pattern across all three isn’t budget size. It’s that administration, funding and citizen behaviour reinforce each other instead of working against one another. The lesson is simple: better cities don’t always need more money. They need all three to work together, with discipline, consistency and citizens willing to play their part.

Disclaimer : The information provided herein is intended solely for educational and informational purposes. The information contained in this document is for general purposes only and is not a complete disclosure of every material fact, term or condition. In the preparation of this document, Dezerv has used publicly available information and other sources believed to be reliable. The information provided in this document has not been independently verified by Dezerv and are subject to change.

Fast forward to today, and the same country is the largest rice exporter on earth, over $11.5 billion worth a year, off roughly the same land, at nearly four times the output. It’s a remarkable transformation, but it rarely gets talked about.

That change matters beyond agriculture. A country that can feed itself has more stable food prices. Stable food prices help keep inflation down. And lower inflation, over time, gives the RBI more room to cut interest rates. Which brings us to where Indian money is headed next.

The RBI puts out a comprehensive annual report covering the economy, banks, savings, investments and markets. We already know the big parts of the India story: GDP is growing, UPI is booming and more money is moving into financial markets. So, in this week’s edition, I went through the report looking for what’s happening beyond those familiar stories, the changes that don’t get as much attention, but matter just as much.

Let’s begin.

A ₹2.2 lakh crore credit economy built on women’s collectives

Walk into a bank without collateral or a credit history, and getting a loan is difficult. A bank needs some reason to believe you’ll repay, and usually, that means having something it can take if you don’t.

For millions of rural women, that problem was solved in a much simpler way: they started lending to each other. Since the 1990s, small groups of people, mostly rural women, have been forming what are called Self-Help Groups. Around ten to fifteen women in a group save a small amount together every month and lend it to each other, informally, no paperwork most banks would recognise. 

Once a group proves it can save and repay reliably as a unit, banks start lending to the group directly, backed by nothing but that shared track record. It’s a version of an idea economists have studied for years, that when a bank can’t verify any one borrower’s honesty, a group that vouches for its own members, and stands to lose access for everyone if one person defaults, can end up more reliable than a stranger with a salary slip. Peer pressure turns out to be a decent substitute for collateral.

In 2006-07, banks lent these groups a combined ₹6,570 crore. This year, that number is ₹2.2 lakh crore. Over 53 lakh groups were financed this year alone. That’s a 34x increase in under two decades. It grew slowly, one group at a time, as banks saw these groups save and repay reliably and became more willing to lend to them.

Electronics have become a bigger export than gems, pharma, and petroleum combined once were

For most of India’s modern history, the list of things India sold to the world was pretty much the same: petroleum, gems and jewellery, textiles, and other raw materials. Things pulled out of the ground, cut, polished, or stitched.

That list has changed a lot in just five years. Electronics exports jumped from $11 billion to $48 billion, a 4.3x increase, overtaking petroleum, gems and jewellery, pharma and chemicals. Global electronics companies are also setting up manufacturing in India as they look for alternatives to China, helped by India’s incentive schemes.

But there’s another side to the story. Over the same period, India’s electronics imports rose from $54 billion to $116 billion — more than twice the value of exports, and growing even faster. India is selling far more electronics to the world, but it is also buying much more from it. The gap is now close to $68 billion.

A large share of what gets assembled and exported from India still runs on chips, displays, and components made somewhere else first. The finished phone leaving an Indian factory carries an Indian export number, but a lot of what’s inside it never was Indian to begin with.

India has built real assembly capability, at real scale, faster than almost anyone expected.What India hasn’t built yet is the deeper supply chain, the components that go into these products. The import numbers show just how much of that gap remains.

Why India’s factory boom is happening in villages, not cities

There’s a version of India’s industrial story almost everyone carries in their head. Small towns emptying out. Young men boarding trains for the nearest big city, chasing factory jobs that pay better than the family farm ever did. It’s the story that played out in China, and the assumption has always been that India would follow the same script. The numbers in this year’s report tell a different geography entirely.

In 1991, close to two out of every three working Indians were in agriculture. Today, it’s fewer than one in two. So people are moving out of agriculture. But they’re not necessarily moving to big cities. Since 2000, the share of rural men working in manufacturing, construction and mining has roughly doubled, from 14% to nearly 28%. In cities, the same number has barely changed. Urban male employment in manufacturing and construction was around 36% in 2000. Today, it’s about 34%. So where did urban workers go? Services.

Employment in trade, transport, IT and other services rose from 58% to more than 60% among urban men. Among urban women, the share rose from 52% to nearly 62%. India’s cities largely skipped the factory-town phase and moved into services. Meanwhile, more of the country’s industrial work has been happening in villages and small towns.

That changes how you think about the electronics boom too. India is building manufacturing capacity quickly, but the workers behind it may increasingly be outside the cities most people associate with industry. And while more Indian workers are moving into new kinds of work, the Indian capital is doing something interesting too.

Indian companies are betting on the rest of the world while retail investors bet everything on India

This year, Indian companies sent a record $33.8 billion of their own money into investments abroad, the highest that figure has ever been. These aren’t foreign fund managers guessing about India from a desk somewhere else. These are the businesses that actually run India’s growth story, choosing to put more of their own capital outside the country than ever before. In the very same year, Indian households put a record $84 billion into domestic mutual funds, nine times the size of what foreign investors pulled out of India. 

It’s tempting to put these two numbers side by side and treat them as a verdict, as if companies are losing confidence in India while households are becoming more bullish on it. But the numbers don’t tell us that.

An Indian company deciding where to deploy its next dollar has a genuinely global set of choices. It can build in India, enter a new market, acquire a company overseas, or invest elsewhere. When more corporate capital flows abroad, it reflects a decision made from a relatively wide menu of options.

The average Indian household doesn’t have the same menu. Investing overseas involves regulatory limits, paperwork, currency considerations and fewer familiar platforms. For most savers, putting money into Indian assets isn’t necessarily a decision made after weighing every market in the world. It’s simply the easiest and most accessible option available.

That makes the two numbers much harder to compare than they first appear.

A record amount of corporate money leaving India tells us something about where businesses see opportunities relative to the alternatives available to them. A record amount of household savings staying in India tells us something about where households are putting their money — but also about the limited set of alternatives they can realistically access.

India lost more banks than it gained this year, and it’s accelerating

The last one is about something that’s been happening for over two decades, and just picked up speed.

The number of banks registered under India’s deposit insurance system has been shrinking since the early 2000s, mostly small cooperative banks getting absorbed, shut down, or occasionally failing outright. This year had the sharpest one-year drop yet: 43 banks de-registered against just 11 newly registered, a net loss of 32 in twelve months. Some of those closures involved deposit insurance actually stepping in to pay out account holders.

This isn’t unique to India, and it’s worth knowing how the same story played out elsewhere. The United States had close to 14,500 community banks in the mid-1980s. Today it has fewer than 5,000, a two-thirds decline over about four decades, driven mostly by two things: bigger banks absorbing smaller ones, and small banks finding it harder every year to afford the compliance and technology costs that come with running a bank at all. 

Interestingly, researchers who’ve studied this consolidation in the US found the effect on local lending wasn’t as bad as feared,  post-merger banks often ended up bigger and more capable of writing larger loans, even as the number of standalone institutions kept falling.

India’s version of this story is still early, running at a fraction of the American pace, concentrated almost entirely in the smallest cooperative tier of banking. But the direction is the same, and this year’s data shows it’s no longer a slow drift. It’s accelerating. 

The India story is changing in the details

A farmer’s group becoming a bankable borrower is one small change. A factory being built closer to a village is another. A phone assembled in India, even if its most valuable components still come from elsewhere, is another. An Indian company investing overseas is another sign that Indian businesses increasingly think beyond the domestic market. None of these tells the India story on its own. But together, they point to something bigger: India is becoming a country with more ways to move money, make things, find work and participate in the economy.

Even fewer small banks can be part of the same story: an economy getting larger often changes the institutions that once served it. None of these shifts makes for a single dramatic headline. That may be exactly why they are easy to miss. But economies rarely transform in one big leap. They change when millions of small decisions start becoming possible that weren’t possible before.

That may be the more interesting India story hiding inside the numbers: not that the economy is simply getting bigger, but that the menu of things Indians can do with their money, work and businesses is getting wider.

Disclaimer: The information provided herein is intended solely for educational purposes. Investment in the securities market is subject to market risks, read all the related documents carefully before investing. The information contained in this document is for general purposes only and is not a complete disclosure of every material fact, terms and conditions. In the preparation of this material, Dezerv has used publicly available information and other sources believed to be reliable. While reasonable care has been taken to present reliable data in this document, Dezerv does not guarantee the accuracy or completeness of the data.

Twelve years later, the market gave investors another crash to respond to. In March 2020, the Nifty fell ~38% in under six weeks, one of the sharpest crashes Indian markets have ever seen.
The reactions were strikingly different. India’s SIP closure ratio jumped to 70% that month, meaning roughly two existing SIPs were being stopped for every three new ones being started. But at the very same time, new demat account openings hit a record 4.9 million that financial year, as a fresh wave of investors treated the crash as their entry point. 

Two groups of investors, watching the same kind of collapse in the same country, developed very different instincts about what a falling market actually means. Neither group was being careless. They were looking at the same crash, but their past experiences had taught them to interpret it differently. And that influence can overpower our judgement when we’re making crucial decisions.

There’s a name for this effect. In this week’s newsletter, I want to unpack where it comes from, how it shapes our decisions, and why you may start noticing it in almost every financial decision you make.

In this edition:

• What behavioral economist calls this, and why It behaves differently from every other bias
• Why fear leaves a deeper mark than facts, and why so many Indian households still trust gold over the market
• What years of market crashes have taught our instincts
• A framework for managing a bias you cannot simply think your way out of
• Why this matters more in an AI-driven market

What behavioral economist calls this, and why It behaves differently from every other bias

Most of what we know about money mistakes comes down to a fairly simple idea, that people don’t process information perfectly. We anchor on the first number we’re shown, we feel the pain of a loss more sharply than the pleasure of an equivalent gain, and we assume tomorrow will look roughly like yesterday. These are the biases behavioral economics has spent decades cataloguing, and the fix for most of them is straightforward in theory. Learn to recognize the pattern, and you can correct it.

What happened to Pai doesn’t follow that rule. Researchers call this the Experience Effect: two people can look at the same information and develop very different financial instincts simply because of what they have personally experienced.

To see how powerful this can be, let’s look at the case of Henry Wallich. In 1974, Wallich joined the board of the US Federal Reserve. He wasn’t an ordinary appointee. He had a PhD from Harvard, a professorship at Yale, and decades of experience studying economies at the highest level. If anyone in that room could be trusted to read the data correctly, it was him.

For the next twelve years, every time the Fed’s committee met to set interest rates, Wallich was looking at the same forecasts and the same models as every other governor in the room. And yet he dissented 27 times, a record that still stands, almost always pushing the same way, for higher rates, even when his colleagues, staring at identical numbers, were convinced it was safe to ease.

When researchers later studied the voting records of every Fed governor going back to 1951, the same pattern turned up again and again. People who had personally lived through high inflation stayed cautious about it for the rest of their careers, no matter what the data in front of them said in any given meeting. Wallich had lived through Germany’s hyperinflation as a child, watching prices double in a day and his family’s savings turn worthless. 

Pai had lived through five years of a portfolio that refused to recover. The decades and the currencies were different, but the mechanism underneath was the same one, and it’s what sets experience effects apart from every other bias behavioral economics has documented. Most biases weaken the moment you learn to spot them in yourself. This one doesn’t, because simply knowing about it isn’t enough to switch it off.

Why fear leaves a deeper mark than facts, and why so many Indian households still trust gold over the market

Walk into almost any Indian household built by a parent or grandparent who came of age before the 1990s, and you’ll usually find the same split, a locker full of gold, a stack of fixed deposit receipts, and a noticeable discomfort with anything resembling equity. Ask why, and there’s often a story behind it: a bank that failed, a business that collapsed, or a period when keeping money in cash felt like the safest thing to do.

That instinct becomes much easier to see when you look at the numbers. Indian households hold an estimated 30,000-35,000 tonnes of gold, worth around ₹450 lakh crore, more than the country’s entire GDP. Even within financial assets, the preference for safety is clear. Of the ₹353 lakh crore in household financial assets, ₹153 lakh crore is in bank deposits and just ₹41 lakh crore is in mutual funds. Only 5.3% of household savings goes into financial products. Much of the rest remains in gold, property and deposits, assets that have felt familiar and safe for generations.

That instinct isn’t stubbornness, and it isn’t really about intelligence either. It comes down to how the brain stores an experience in the first place. When you learn a fact from a book or an advisor, your brain files it away as information, useful, but essentially inert. 

When you live through something frightening instead, watching a family’s savings shrink or a business go under, the brain does something different. It tags that memory with the fear that came alongside it. Neuroscientists call this emotional tagging, and fear-tagged memories are both easier to recall and quicker to resurface than ordinary facts, especially when something even loosely similar happens again. Every repeat brush with that fear strengthens the pathway a little further.

The fingerprint of this shows up clearly in the data on investing behavior. One study compared people who had lived through strong stock market returns over their lifetimes with people who had lived through consistently weaker ones, holding the information available to both groups constant, and found the first group was 14 percentage points more likely to invest in stocks at all, against an average market participation rate of just 37%. 

The same pattern turns up among people whose entire job is supposed to be rational about money. Fund managers who lived through a bubble tend to carry that bubble’s shadow into every market cycle that follows. CEOs who led companies through severe downturns were found, using photo-based aging analysis, to visibly age faster than peers who hadn’t. An entire generation of Americans who grew up during the high-inflation 1970s kept avoiding cheaper adjustable-rate mortgages decades later, purely because the fear had never fully left them, a habit that cost that generation of borrowers a combined $22 billion in unnecessary interest.

None of this reflects a failure of intelligence in any of these people. It’s memory doing precisely what memory evolved to do, protecting them from something that, by the time the decision actually gets made, has usually already stopped being a real threat.

What years of market crashes have taught our instincts

The Sensex fell nearly 53% in less than a year during 2008. Across the country, investors pulled back from equity funds almost entirely. Net investment in equity mutual funds fell to just ₹1,056 crore in 2008-09, and dropped further to ₹595 crore the following year.

By September 2010, the Sensex had climbed back above 20,000, close to its pre-crash highs. Household savings in gold more than doubled in the years after, from 1.3% of GDP in 2008-09 to 2.8% by 2011-12, as investors moved money out of markets and into something that felt safer. 

And by fiscal year 2010-11, Indian investors withdrew ~₹13,500 crore more from equity mutual funds than they invested. Even though the market had already recovered, the memory of 2008 was still fresh. The numbers said it was a reasonable time to stay invested. What people remembered said otherwise, and across the country, memory won. 

Demonetisation in 2016 did something a little different but closely related. It made cash itself, the most trusted asset in most Indian households, feel unreliable overnight. 

Covid period added a different kind of shock, and this one was felt worldwide. It wasn’t just the market fall, but the stress that came with it. Researchers measuring reported stress across seventy years of inflationary periods found Covid-era inflation produced stress levels roughly three times higher than any period on record, higher than the Great Inflation of the 1970s, higher than 2008 itself. 

Then came the global rate-hike cycle in 2022. As central banks raised rates sharply, investors became less willing to pay high valuations for companies whose profits were still years away. And richly valued growth stocks fell hard within months.

These experiences don’t simply vanish when the market recovers. Behavioral research shows that lived experiences physically alter how our neural pathways process future choices, a mechanism known as long-term potentiation. The trauma of a market crash leaves a lasting biological trace that shapes our basic instincts around risk.

How to manage a bias you cannot simply think your way out of

None of this means the instinct is a flaw to be argued away, because you cannot lecture a brain out of a biological memory. No amount of spreadsheets or market commentary erases an emotional impulse wired by past stress. Awareness on its own doesn’t fix experience effects. What actually works looks a little different, and it starts before the next shock ever arrives.

Build rules while markets are calm. A portfolio decided ahead of time, with clear triggers for when to rebalance, is far less likely to be driven by fear once markets actually turn. The goal is to decide what you’ll do before emotion gets a vote in the matter.

Separate the decision from the moment. The worst financial calls tend to get made exactly when fear or excitement is at its peak. A short pause between a market event and a portfolio decision can be the difference between reacting to something and actually responding to it.

Whether a shock leaves a lasting mark also comes down to two things: how much you saw it coming, and how much control you had over your own response to it.

The matrix below maps out what that looks like in practice, and what moves you toward safer ground.

Bring in a perspective that doesn’t share your scars. You may not always see how your past is influencing a decision. Someone who didn’t live through your 2008 or your 2020 may look at the same numbers without the same emotional baggage, and spot something you can’t.

Your instincts aren’t necessarily wrong. They’re shaped by what you’ve lived through. The best defence is to have a system and another perspective that can challenge those instincts when they start driving the decision.

Why this matters more in an AI-driven market

Two people looking at the exact same stock today can pull up nearly identical research within seconds, earnings transcripts, analyst notes, sentiment scores, all surfaced by the same AI tools within minutes of each other. Whatever edge used to come from knowing something first is disappearing at the exact pace AI keeps improving.

What isn’t disappearing is the part of investing that was never really about information to begin with.

Every investor carries instincts shaped by what they’ve personally lived through, and no model can read those instincts for you, because you often can’t fully read them yourself. AI gets better at analysis every quarter. It gets no better at knowing whether your own conviction about a stock is coming from research, or from the year you happened to start investing.

This is why behavioural edges can last longer than informational or analytical ones. They don’t depend on having better data or faster models. AI may make information, analysis, and even sophisticated tools available to everyone. What it can’t easily equalise is how each person responds to uncertainty, fear, and opportunity. The real advantage lies in knowing when you’re making a considered financial decision, and when an old experience is making it for you.

Disclaimer: Investment in the securities market is subject to market risks, read all the related documents carefully before investing. The information provided herein is intended solely for educational purposes and should not be construed as solicitation, advertising, or providing any financial or investment advice or an offer to buy or sell any financial instruments. Readers are advised to consult with their financial advisor before making investment decisions based on the information provided herein. In this material, Dezerv has utilized information through publicly available sources, and other data deemed to be reliable. While reasonable care has been made to present reliable data in this article, Dezerv does not guarantee the accuracy or completeness of the data. Dezerv, along with its directors, employees, or partners or any of its affiliates, shall not be held liable for any loss, damage, or liability arising from the use of this document.