Driven by addition in equity fund folios, mutual fund (MF) houses have registered a surge of more than 29 lakh investor accounts in the first six months of the current fiscal, taking the total tally to surpass 5-crore mark.

This is on top of an additional 59 lakh folios in 2015-16 and 22 lakh in 2014-15. In the last two years, investor accounts increased mainly due to robust contribution from smaller towns.

Folios are numbers designated to individual investor accounts, though one investor can have multiple folios.

According to the Association of Mutual Funds of India (AMFI) data on total investor accounts with 43 fund houses, the number of folios rose to a record 5,05,59,495 at the end of last month from 4,76,63,024 in March-end, a gain of of 28.96 lakh.

Growing participation from retail investors, especially from smaller towns, and huge inflows into equity schemes have helped in increasing the overall folio counts, experts said.

The equity category witnessed an addition of more than 15 lakh investor folios to 3.75 crore during April-September this fiscal.

Mutual funds have reported a net inflow of Rs over 22,000 crore in equity schemes in the first half of the current fiscal. Overall, funds have seen an infusion of Rs 2.34 lakh crore.

The inflow is in line with the Sensex surging 10 per cent during the period under review.

Mutual funds are investment vehicles made up of a pool of funds collected from a large number of investors. The funds are invested in stocks, bonds and money market instruments, among others.

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