Capital Realisation Index.
How much capital actually comes back — real cash realised by owners and sponsors, in one number. The third leg — after Formation and Efficiency.
Capital floods in (159) and comes back briskly (113) — but works only at baseline (102). High churn, flat productivity. The weak link isn't liquidity; it's output per rupee.
100 = 24-month average realisation (z-scored; M&A & secondaries are wide-range, low-base channels).
In 2025 the mix rotated hard — M&A and secondaries surged while IPO exits and buybacks fell. Latest reads anchor to official 2025 releases.
Total value sponsors realised exiting portfolio companies — the headline private-market liquidity number.
Source ↗ Bain India Private Equity Report 2026Realisation via trade sale — strategic buyers acquiring whole businesses. The exit route that surged in 2025.
Source ↗ EY / Grant Thornton, Dec 2025Exits via IPO, block deals, and buybacks. The traditional channel — and 2025's laggard.
Source ↗ Bain / Business Standard, 2025Dividends plus buybacks returned to public shareholders — the steady-state realisation of listed capital.
Source ↗ Business Standard, Jun 2025LP-stake sales and fund secondaries — the fastest-growing escape hatch as IPOs stay shut. Winsorised.
Source ↗ IVCA / 360 ONE–VCCEdge, Nov 2025Smoothed, rebased, winsorised, weighted.
PE/VC exits, strategic/M&A sales, public-market exits (IPO, block, buyback), cash payout, and fund secondaries — every route by which capital actually returns to its owners.
Only realised liquidity counts. Mark-ups, unrealised TVPI, and paper IRR are excluded by design — this is a DPI-world index, built for the metric LPs now rank first.
Trailing 3-month average, rebase each channel to 100 at mid-2024, then clamp every sub-index to a [50, 180] band so a low-base rocket (secondaries) or one mega-exit can't hijack the composite.
The headline can stay firm while the mix churns. In 2025 M&A and secondaries surged as IPO exits and buybacks fell — the index holds, the composition shifts. Both are reported.
Form (CFI) → Work (CEI) → Return (CRI). The three together place where India sits in the capital cycle — and the gaps between them are the real signal.
- · Marks ≠ cash — unrealised gains and paper IRR are excluded; only distributed liquidity is counted.
- · Mega-exit distortion — winsorisation caps any single channel so one jumbo trade sale can't define a month.
- · Low-base illusion — fast-growing secondaries are clamped so a small absolute pool can't dominate the read.
- · Channel substitution — a fall in IPO exits offset by M&A is flagged as rotation, not double-counted as growth.
Data vintage June 2026. Latest reads anchor to official 2025 releases — Bain (PE/VC exits), EY/Grant Thornton (M&A), Business Standard/Capitaline (payout, buybacks), and IVCA / 360 ONE–VCCEdge (secondaries). The within-period monthly distribution is Gravitywell's reconstruction; channel reads reconcile to the cited primary sources. Private exit and secondary figures revise for several quarters.
The cash that comes back.
The Capital Realisation Index and the full Form → Work → Return trilogy update every month.