‘Free the rupee. Let it go’—How to save the market from investors

विवरण

Everything around the Indian economy looks shaky, i.e., a months-long conflict, a sliding rupee, and a government telling people to stop buying gold. Except for one important caveat: India’s market continues to hold on. The Sensex and Nifty have barely moved. The reason why that seems to be happening is pretty simple — every month, Indian households pour ₹31,000 crore into equity through SIP (Systematic Investment Plans), and that steady flow is exactly the liquidity foreign investors are using to sell down and leave without crashing anything. So the rupee slides, the RBI burns reserves to slow the fall, and the saver gets squeezed from both ends. Eventually, they are told to stay in the market and to stop buying gold. Essentially, the Indian saver is not just holding the market up - they may be funding the exit.Praveen puts that thesis to two of the sharpest minds in Indian markets, and they spend the next ninety minutes taking it apart. Anupam Manur argues that foreigners are leaving for real, structural reasons and puts forward a “triple loss” argument, which says that propping up an overvalued market is the way because the Indian saver has nowhere else to go. Deepak Shenoy, on the other hand, argues we're worried about the wrong thing entirely: foreigners still hold most of their money here, we've seen this exact exit before, and the SIP saver isn't going anywhere. Where they land together is stranger than where they started, with specific fixes and policy changes that they’d do in this current situation. The most provocative one is the one that Deepak puts across - "Free the rupee. Let it go. It'll come back."This episode is a conversation about who really owns the Indian market, whether the SIP saver is a floor, and what India would actually have to do to break the loop.GuestsAnupam Manur — Professor of Economics, Takshashila InstitutionDeepak Shenoy — Founder & CEO, CapitalmindReferencesAnupam's piece: Taxing Mobile Capital and the Limits of Domestic Absorption (Takshashila)Deepak on X: @DeepakShenoy