INTRODUCTION

Genesis of Mutual Funds :

The goal of security industry is to a nation of shareholding capitalists to make every man and woman a participant in corporate activities. A small investor is unsophisticated as far as corporate investment is concerned, with the limited resources he/she cannot buy share of blue chip companies. He may not in most cases get allotment of the shares applied for in the primary market, on the other hand he will get full allotment of some dud shares. His investment would therefore not be balanced and diversified. He is not thereby able to minimize his risk by spreading his limited funds over different industries. He has limited access to price sensitive information on the stock exchange. He may not know the developments taking place that take place in the equity market and corporate bodies.

History of the Indian Mutual Fund Industry

The mutual fund industry in India started in 1963 with the formation of Unit Trust of India, at the initiative of the Government of India and Reserve Bank the. The history of mutual funds in India can be broadly divided into four distinct phases

First Phase – 1964-87 Unit Trust of India (UTI) was established on 1963 by an Act of Parliament. It was set up by the Reserve Bank of India and functioned under the Regulatory and administrative control of the Reserve Bank of India. In 1978 UTI was de-linked from the RBI and the Industrial Development Bank of India (IDBI) took over the regulatory and administrative control in place of RBI. The first scheme launched by UTI was Unit Scheme 1964. At the end of 1988 UTI had Rs.6,700 crores of assets under management.

Second Phase – 1987-1993 (Entry of Public Sector Funds) 1987 marked the entry of non- UTI, public sector mutual funds set up by public sector banks and Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC) and General Insurance