Every month, millions of bank accounts send out small, automated payments. Nobody celebrates. Nobody posts about it. Nobody even notices. But ten years later, these unremarkable transactions have built something remarkable. This is the story of how India’s savers became investors, not through dramatic market calls or guru predictions, but through the simple act of showing up. Month after month. Year after year. Through crashes and euphoria alike. Three decades ago, when someone mentioned mutual funds, the typical response involved confusion with cooperatives or perhaps even chit funds. The few who understood were treated with suspicion. Why would you give your money to strangers to invest when your brother-in-law was an ‘agent’? Why pay fees when bank fixed deposits and PPF are always there? The answer, it turns out, wasn’t in the products themselves but in what they made possible: a process that worked even when you didn’t.
