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Retail investors have been flocking to mutual funds, especially equity funds, over the past two-three years. This is thanks partly to campaigns such as Mutual Fund Sahi Hai by the Association of Mutual Funds in India or AMFI. Their preferred route has been systematic investment plans or SIPs. “Between April 2016 – when AMFI started disclosing monthly SIP contributions – and June 2019, the route helped rake in a whopping ₹2.3 lakh crore. That is nearly 19 percent of the ₹11.9 lakh crore increase in assets under management (AUM) of the industry,” says a Crisil-AMFI report. “The surge has come on the back of scores of new retail investors joining the ranks, too, as reflected in the almost 3x growth in the number of SIP accounts to 27.3 million from 10 million over this period,” says the report.

However, SIP registrations have slowed down this year. AMFI data shows that last year, monthly SIP investments grew 16 percent between April and September from ₹6,690 crore to ₹7,985 crore, while in 2019, the growth during the period was a marginal 0.30