Learn the basics

A demat account is the electronic locker that holds the shares, ETFs and bonds you buy on the Indian stock market. It is opened with a SEBI-registered broker (acting as a depository participant) who connects you to one of the two Indian depositories — CDSL or NSDL. Without a demat account, you cannot hold shares in India today.

Investing in the Indian share market today is fully online and takes about a week to go from "I want to start" to your first trade. This guide walks through the full sequence — account opening, what to buy, how brokerage works, and the early mistakes that cost beginners the most money.

A demat account looks free at first glance — most discount brokers advertise ₹0 opening. The real cost shows up across five line items, some of which only apply on certain trades. Here is every charge that can hit a retail Indian demat account, with the typical range across the market.

DP charges — short for depository participant charges — are a flat ₹10–₹20 fee that hits your account every time you sell shares from a demat account in India. They surprise most beginners because they are invisible on the order screen and only show up on the contract note after the trade. Here is what they actually are.

The demat account holds your shares; the trading account places the orders. Both are needed to invest in the Indian share market, and both are usually opened together with one broker — but they are two distinct accounts with different functions, different charges and (sometimes) different brokers.

STT — Securities Transaction Tax — is a small but unavoidable tax the Indian government collects on every securities trade executed on NSE and BSE. It is identical across brokers, levied at the time of trade, and visible as a line item on the contract note. Here are the rates, when they apply, and how STT fits into your total trading cost.

"Zero brokerage" demat accounts are a popular marketing pitch, but no Indian broker is genuinely cost-free. Most "zero brokerage" claims refer to a specific segment — typically equity delivery — while other segments and account-level charges still apply. Here is what to look for and which brokers come closest to the genuinely-free promise.

Opening a demat account online in India is fully paperless for resident Indians and takes about 20–30 minutes of active work, with activation in 1–3 working days. This is the step-by-step path most discount brokers now use — Aadhaar e-KYC, an in-person verification video, and an e-sign on the agreement.

When you hit Submit on a demat account application, six things happen in sequence — only one of which is visible to you. Understanding the full process helps you anticipate where applications stall and how to check status when nothing seems to be happening on your side.

Opening a demat account in India needs five documents for a basic resident account, with two more for F&O activation and a heavier set for NRIs. Most online rejections trace back to one of these documents being unclear or mismatched — this checklist covers what to have, what the broker actually checks, and the common quality issues to avoid.

The annual maintenance charge (AMC) is the largest recurring cost on a buy-and-hold demat account in India. Most discount brokers charge ₹0–₹300 a year; full-service brokers go higher. There is also a SEBI-mandated reduced-AMC option called BSDA that most investors do not know exists.

Demat accounts in India are structurally safe by design — SEBI built the architecture specifically so that broker failure cannot reach your shares. Shares are held by depositories, not by brokers. Funds are segregated. The real risk in 2026 is not your broker shutting down — it is your own credentials being compromised. Here is what the protection model actually looks like.

No SEBI-registered broker requires a minimum balance in your demat account in India. You can hold one share or zero shares; the account stays open as long as you pay the annual maintenance charge (AMC). The confusion usually comes from mixing up the demat account with the trading account and bank account — each has different rules. Here is the clean version.

Brokerage is the fee your broker charges for executing a trade. The Indian market has two pricing models — flat per order (discount brokers) and percentage of turnover (full-service brokers) — and the math is simple once you see it on a real trade. Here is how brokerage actually works, with worked examples.

Choosing a stock broker in India comes down to four questions: what you actually trade, what it will cost you all-in, whether the broker is safe and SEBI-registered, and whether the app and support fit how you work. There is no single best broker — the right one depends on your trading pattern. This guide walks through the decision the way an informed investor would make it.

For a beginner, the best stock broker in India is the one that is cheap to hold, simple to use, and safe — not the one with the most features. Almost every major discount broker is a reasonable first account; the differences that matter early on are app simplicity, zero or low delivery brokerage, low AMC, and responsive support. This guide explains what to weigh and what to ignore until later.

Online brokerage — the discount-broker model that now dominates Indian retail investing — trades the advisory and hand-holding of a traditional broker for far lower cost and full self-service. For most self-directed investors that is a good deal, but it is not free of trade-offs. Here is a balanced look at the pros and cons before you decide.

The RBI Floating Rate Savings Bond 2020 (Taxable) — often just called "the RBI bond" — is a 7-year Government of India savings bond that pays 8.05% a year for July-December 2026. The rate floats: it resets every 1 January and 1 July at the NSC rate plus 0.35%, so it can move up or down. It is one of the safest fixed-income options a resident Indian can buy, with a ₹1,000 minimum and no upper limit — but it carries a hard 7-year lock-in (relaxed only for senior citizens) and the interest is taxed at your income slab, not tax-free. Here is the current rate, the rate history, who sells it, how to buy it, and how it stacks up against a bank FD, NSC and SCSS.

Government bonds are the debt the Indian government and its states issue to borrow money: you lend, they pay interest, and you get your capital back at maturity. They are the closest thing to a risk-free rupee return — backed by a sovereign that can ultimately print the currency it owes you. This guide covers the full menu — dated G-Secs, Treasury Bills, State Development Loans, the RBI Floating Rate Savings Bond and Sovereign Gold Bonds — with current yields, exactly how each is taxed, and the cheapest route to buy each one.

54EC capital gain bonds — also called capital gain bonds — let you avoid long-term capital gains (LTCG) tax on the sale of a property by parking the gain, up to a ₹50 lakh aggregate cap, into an AAA-rated PSU bond instead of paying the tax. They pay a fixed coupon — 5.25% as of July 2026 — and lock your money in for five years. The rate is deliberately low: the reason to buy is the tax you save, not the yield — and whether that maths works depends on your slab and what else you'd do with the money.

Buying bonds in India is no longer just for institutions — since a July 2024 SEBI rule let issuers privately place corporate bonds at a face value as low as ₹10,000 (down from ₹1 lakh, where the issuer appoints a merchant banker), you can start a corporate bond, a government security or an 8.05% RBI savings bond with pocket-money sums, mostly online. This guide is the map: what a bond is, the four types you'll meet, every channel you can buy through and its real minimum, how to place your first order, and the risks the marketing pages leave out. From here, follow the links to the specific guide for whichever bond you're actually considering.

A corporate bond is a loan you make to a company — an NBFC, a housing-finance firm, a manufacturer, a PSU — in return for a fixed coupon and your capital back on a set date. In India most retail corporate bonds are issued as NCDs (non-convertible debentures), and they pay more than a bank FD or a government bond for one reason: you are taking on the issuer's credit risk. Get the issuer right and you can earn roughly 8-11% on paper you can actually understand. Get it wrong and you can lose part or all of your money — as investors in IL&FS (2018), DHFL (2019) and, even through SEBI-registered platforms, TruCap (July 2025) found out. This guide covers what corporate bonds and NCDs are, the AAA-to-D credit-rating ladder and what each rung means for your risk, the yields on offer today by rating bucket, secured vs unsecured, how they are taxed, where to buy them, and the risks the sales pages leave out. Every rate and tax figure here is date-stamped to 9 July 2026 — always confirm the live number before you invest.

Tax-free bonds are about as close as Indian fixed income gets to a free lunch: the interest they pay is fully exempt from income tax — no TDS, no slab, no upper limit — under Section 10(15)(iv)(h) of the Income Tax Act. The catch is that you cannot buy a new one. Government-backed issuers like NHAI, IRFC, PFC, REC and HUDCO raised this money between 2012 and early 2016, and none have been issued since. Today the only way in is to buy an existing bond from another investor on the stock exchange, where they trade at a premium — so the yield you actually earn (roughly 5–5.5% tax-free as of July 2026) is well below the 7.5–9% coupon printed on the bond. This guide covers what is exempt (and what is not — your capital gain on sale is still taxed), who the issuers are, the yield you would really pocket, why that tax-free income is worth far more to a 30%-bracket investor than the headline number suggests, and how to buy on the exchange without getting caught out by thin liquidity.

A Treasury bill (T-bill) is short-term debt of the Government of India — the safest place a resident can park money for under a year. There are three of them: 91-day, 182-day and 364-day. They pay no coupon. Instead they are sold at a discount to a ₹100 face value and redeemed at the full ₹100 at maturity, and that gap is your entire return. In mid-2026 the cut-off yields sat around 5.2% on the 91-day and 5.8% on the 364-day. This guide covers what T-bills are, the latest auction yields (date-stamped), exactly how the discount and yield are calculated with a worked example, the three ways to buy them (RBI Retail Direct is free), how the gain is taxed — and the honest catch: right now a good bank FD often pays more for the same short horizon.

The Bharat Bond ETF is the simplest way for a retail investor to own a basket of India's safest corporate bonds — AAA-rated paper issued by government-owned companies like NABARD, Power Finance Corporation, REC, IRFC and Indian Oil — inside one exchange-traded fund, for a cost of roughly ₹1 a year on every ₹2 lakh invested. It was launched in December 2019 by Edelweiss Asset Management on a mandate from DIPAM (the government's disinvestment department), which makes it India's first corporate (CPSE/PSU) bond ETF — and, by a wide margin, its largest bond ETF of any kind (gilt/G-sec bond ETFs, such as LIC MF's G-Sec Long Term ETF from 2014, predate it). What sets it apart from an ordinary bond fund is "target maturity": each series has a fixed end date — April 2030, 2031, 2032 or 2033 — and if you hold to that date, your return lands close to the yield the fund was quoting when you bought in. This guide covers the live series and their indicative yields, the ultra-low expense ratio, how target maturity actually behaves, the post-April-2023 rules that tax it like any other debt fund, and how it stacks up against an FMP, buying bonds directly, and a plain bank FD — plus how to buy it with or without a demat account.

A market linked debenture (MLD) is a bond whose return is not a fixed coupon but is linked to how some market benchmark — the Nifty 50, the Sensex, gold, or the 10-year government bond yield — behaves over the life of the debenture. Most are issued by NBFCs and sold through wealth managers, and for years they had one killer feature: if you held a listed MLD for more than 12 months, the gain was taxed at just 10% long-term capital gains, versus your full slab rate on a plain bond or FD. That single tax gap was the whole reason high-net-worth investors bought them. Budget 2023 closed it. Since 1 April 2023, Section 50AA taxes every rupee of MLD gain as short-term capital gain at your income slab, no matter how long you held it. This guide explains what MLDs are, how the payoff actually works, who issues them, the SEBI reforms that opened them to smaller investors, and — the part that matters most — exactly what the tax change did and who MLDs are still for now that their advantage is gone.

A green bond is an ordinary bond with one extra promise: the money you lend is ring-fenced for climate and environmental projects — solar and wind farms, clean transport, energy-efficient buildings, water and waste treatment. You still get a coupon and your capital back at maturity; the "green" label only tells you what the borrower may spend the proceeds on. India joined this market in January 2023, when the Government of India issued its first Sovereign Green Bonds (SGrBs) through the RBI. This guide covers what green bonds actually are, India's sovereign green bond programme and its issuance record, current yields (roughly in line with regular G-Secs at about 6.7%), how a retail investor can buy them, corporate and municipal green bonds, SEBI's green-bond rulebook — and the honest bottom line: for you as an investor, an SGrB's return profile is essentially the same as a normal government bond of the same tenure. The difference is where the money goes, not what you earn.

If you searched for "how to buy bonds in Zerodha", start with the thing most guides get wrong: Zerodha's old Coin bond store — the curated corporate-bond shelf that used to live at coin.zerodha.com/bonds — has been withdrawn. Zerodha officially states it no longer offers corporate bonds, and it does not run a primary corporate-bond marketplace. (One nuance: Coin still lists corporate-bond mutual funds — funds that hold a basket of corporate bonds — so "no corporate bonds on Zerodha" means no individual, directly held corporate bonds you pick yourself, not the funds.) Zerodha last publicly confirmed this on 1 September 2025, and back in 2024 it said it was "working on enabling this on Kite", so the position can change — check the live status in the app. That does not mean you can't buy bonds through Zerodha. In 2026 there are two live routes: government securities (G-secs), Treasury Bills and State Development Loans bought at the RBI's weekly non-competitive-bidding auction — on which Zerodha waived its brokerage in March 2024 — and any listed bond or NCD you can buy on the secondary market on Kite by searching its name or symbol, exactly like a share. What Zerodha does NOT give you is a wide, curated corporate-bond shelf, because it is not a SEBI-registered Online Bond Platform Provider (OBPP). This guide covers exactly what you can and can't buy, the step-by-step for each route, what it costs, and when you should use an OBPP instead.

Groww is India's largest retail broker by client count, and bonds are one of its newer in-app products. One thing is confirmed live today: corporate bond IPOs — apply just like a stock IPO, from a ₹10,000 minimum. Buying already-listed corporate bonds / NCDs on the secondary market is the second product, but as of 9 July 2026 we could not confirm it is live in-app from any Groww-owned source; Groww's December 2025 SEBI Online Bond Platform Provider (OBPP) licence enables that secondary distribution, and it appears to be rolling out rather than fully switched on — so verify it in the app before you count on it. Groww is a SEBI-registered stock broker (entity: Groww Invest Tech Private Limited, reg. no. INZ000301838). This guide covers exactly what you can buy, the step-by-step to place an order, what it costs (and why Groww's bond fee is oddly hard to pin down), and how buying on Groww compares to buying on Zerodha or on a pure-play bond platform like Wint Wealth or IndiaBonds. Where a live detail can't be confirmed, we say so and tell you to check in-app rather than guess.