Personal Finance

Lockers to demat: How gold ETFs are changing India’s ties with the yellow metal

Sohini Mitter

January 06, 2026 | 11 Min Read

In 2025, gold ETFs quietly turned the country’s most emotional asset into a financial one. As AUM crossed Rs 1 lakh crore, investors chose transparency over tradition, SIPs over bank lockers, and asset allocation over impulse, reshaping how India owns gold.

For decades, gold in India has lived inside lockers, wedding trousseaus, and family legacies. It was wealth you could touch, not wealth you tracked on an app. But a quiet transformation is underway. Gold’s cultural ownership is now translating into financial ownership via gold ETFs (exchange-traded funds).

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