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.
The lifecycle · Form → Work → Return
Capital floods in (154) and comes back briskly (112), but works only at baseline (102). High churn, flat productivity. The weak link isn't liquidity; it's output per rupee.
The realisation index
100 = 24-month average realisation (z-scored; M&A & secondaries are wide-range, low-base channels).
The five 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 ↗ EY-IVCA, Apr 2026Realisation via trade sale: strategic buyers acquiring whole businesses. The exit route that surged in 2025.
Source ↗ Grant Thornton Dealtracker, Aug 2026Exits via IPO, block deals, and buybacks. The traditional channel, and 2025's laggard.
Source ↗ Prime Database / Business Standard, Aug 2026Dividends plus buybacks returned to public shareholders: the steady-state realisation of listed capital.
Source ↗ Business Standard / Capitaline, Jun 2026LP-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.
How it's built
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 July 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.
Methodology v3.2 (2026-07). Built to the OECD/JRC composite-indicator handbook: distance-to-reference normalisation, 3-month smoothing, weighted aggregation, plus a drop-one-pillar uncertainty band and a data-coverage ratio (shown above). Series are point-in-time; published values are not silently restated.
The cash that comes back.
The Capital Realisation Index and the full Form → Work → Return trilogy update every month.