What this charter is actually built from

Each of the eight cards below is a real, currently-live policy thread in India's capital markets, not a hypothetical wishlist. The retail-saver asks respond to genuine, recent regulatory moves: Union Budget 2024 raised the long-term capital gains rate from 10 to 12.5 per cent and short-term gains from 15 to 20 per cent, removed indexation benefit on the sale of most assets, and lifted the LTCG exemption threshold to ₹1.25 lakh — a package retail investors have pushed back on ever since, arguing it penalises exactly the buy-and-hold behaviour regulators otherwise say they want to encourage. SEBI's own December 2025 mutual-fund expense-ratio overhaul cuts the maximum base expense ratio for large equity schemes (above ₹50,000 crore in assets) from 1.05 to 0.95 per cent, and for equivalent-size debt schemes from 0.80 to 0.70 per cent, redefining the levy itself as a “Base Expense Ratio” that strips out statutory charges like GST and SEBI/exchange fees so investors can actually compare like-for-like costs across funds — the “true cost” card above is asking that this reset be carried through in full, not partially rolled back under industry pressure.

The market-and-industry asks track a parallel set of live reforms on the exchange-infrastructure side. SEBI's optional T+0 (same-day) settlement cycle, launched as a 25-stock beta in March 2024, had expanded to the top 500 stocks by market capitalisation by end-2025, with all brokers permitted to participate and further mid-cap expansion under discussion — still optional alongside the standard T+1 cycle, which is exactly what the charter's “settle faster” card is pushing to change by scaling it further. FPI net settlement, easier Alternative Investment Fund rules, and simplified IPO disclosure are all active items in the same capital-markets reform pipeline SEBI and the Finance Ministry have been running through 2025 and 2026, aimed at lowering the cost and friction of foreign and domestic capital reaching Indian companies.

Three ways to read the same eight asks

It's worth being explicit that these eight cards aren't one voice giving one verdict — they're three different, sometimes conflicting constituencies each stating its own case, which is the actual point of framing this as a charter rather than a recommendation. The retail-investor reading treats the 2024 tax hikes and the F&O guardrails as necessary but incomplete: welcome as investor protection, but landing hardest on the same small, patient saver the market claims to want more of. SEBI's own public rationale for the F&O restrictions and the finfluencer crackdown is different again — delta-based position limits and unregistered-adviser enforcement are framed by the regulator as protecting retail traders from measurable, well-documented losses in options trading, not as a tax on legitimate participation, a framing this charter's card 2 explicitly tries to hold in tension (“protect me, don't cage me”) rather than pick a side on. And the market/industry asks come from a third constituency again — brokers, exchanges, and issuers who read faster settlement, eased AIF rules, and deeper bond markets primarily as competitiveness and capital-cost questions, not investor-protection ones. None of that makes any one reading wrong; it's why a genuine “charter” needs eight cards and three tags, not one number to agree or disagree with.