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NRI Services

Special Tax Benefit for Non-Resident Indians (NRI)

Chapter XII-A of the Income Tax Act, covering Sections 115C to 115-I, sets out a special, and often underused, tax regime specifically for NRIs on their investment income from certain foreign exchange assets, and it’s worth understanding even for NRIs who already have a broader tax filing set up.

Under this chapter, investment income earned by an NRI on “specified assets,” which include shares in Indian companies, debentures, deposits with Indian companies, and Central Government securities, acquired using foreign exchange, is taxed at a concessional flat rate, rather than at regular slab rates. Long-term capital gains on the transfer of such specified assets also get concessional treatment under this chapter. The rates involved have been subject to change through various Finance Acts, so the current applicable rate should always be confirmed rather than assumed from a previous year.

One of the more valuable, and less well-known, provisions here is Section 115F, which allows an NRI to claim exemption on long-term capital gains from specified assets if the net proceeds are reinvested in specified new assets, such as shares of an Indian company or deposits with certain financial institutions, within six months of the transfer, similar in spirit to Section 54EC available to residents but tailored to NRI-specific asset categories.

There’s also a simplification benefit built in: once an NRI opts into this Chapter XII-A regime for a particular assessment year, they aren’t required to file a return at all for that income if tax has been fully deducted at source, though many NRIs still choose to file for various practical reasons.

An NRI can also choose not to be governed by this chapter for a given year and instead be taxed under normal provisions, whichever works out more beneficial, which makes a year-by-year comparison worth doing rather than defaulting to one regime out of habit.

Ashutosh Financial Services helps NRI clients work out whether this special regime or the normal provisions serve them better in a given year. Ashutosh Financial Services runs sessions specifically addressing these NRI-specific tax provisions.

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Investment Services

Future of Investing

Investing has changed more in the last fifteen years than in the several decades before that, and most of the change has been about access rather than about entirely new asset classes appearing out of nowhere.

The most visible shift has been the collapse of the barrier between “having money” and “being able to invest it well.” SIPs turned equity mutual fund investing into a habit that could start with a few thousand rupees a month rather than requiring a lump sum. Direct stock investing, once gated by physical share certificates and paperwork-heavy brokers, now happens through apps in minutes. Portfolio Management Services and Alternative Investment Funds, once the exclusive domain of the very wealthy working through private bankers, are now formally regulated products with defined entry points that a much broader set of investors can access.

Technology’s next contribution looks less about access and more about personalisation and analysis: better tools for understanding risk, more granular data on fund and portfolio performance, and AI-assisted analysis that can process information at a scale no individual investor or advisor could manage manually. This doesn’t replace judgment; if anything, it raises the value of good judgment, since raw information has become abundant while the ability to interpret it sensibly hasn’t.

Regulation has also matured alongside all of this. SEBI’s ongoing tightening of disclosure norms, expense ratios, and product suitability requirements reflects a market that’s grown large and complex enough to need more careful oversight than it did when mutual funds were a niche product.

What hasn’t changed, and probably won’t, is that investing success still depends on time horizon, discipline, and asset allocation suited to individual goals, regardless of how sophisticated the tools around it become.

Ashutosh Financial Services has watched these shifts unfold while keeping its focus on the fundamentals that outlast any particular trend. Ashutosh Financial Services continues to run investor education programmes built around that principle.