Buying Government Bonds Yourself — RBI Retail Direct

You've learned what a government bond is — a G-Sec you can hold for years, a T-Bill for a few months, the sovereign borrower who has never defaulted on a rupee (Lessons 32 and 33). And somewhere in there a quieter thought arrived: *I could just… buy one myself?* Directly from the Reserve Bank, no fund, no broker taking a cut? Then, right behind it, the fear that keeps most people out: it's an official RBI portal. What if I fill a field wrong, or bid at the wrong price, or my money disappears into some government system and gets *stuck*?

Here is the reassurance before a single screen. The account is free — RBI charges nothing to open it, keep it, or bid. The buying is guided — and the clever part, which we'll spend real time on, is that a non-competitive bid means you never name a price, so you literally *cannot* bid wrong. The bonds are sovereign-safe — the safest rupee asset there is. And your money is never in limbo: at every step it's either in your own bank or in a government bond in your own name, and it comes back on a schedule you can see in advance. By the end, this will feel less like a government portal and more like the calmest purchase you make all year.

We follow three people, each using the same free rail for a different job. Suresh Menon — 55, a Kochi CA with a ~₹1.8 crore (₹1.8 crore is ₹1,80,00,000) portfolio — is the confident do-it-yourselfer: he opens the account and places a non-competitive bid for a 10-year G-Sec, locking a coupon for a decade. Lakshmi Rao — 64, a Hyderabad widow living on a ₹95 lakh corpus (₹95,00,000) who needs about ₹50,000 a month — parks money she'll need soon in a 91-day T-Bill and sets an auto-bid so it rolls itself. And Imran Sheikh — 30, a Lucknow schoolteacher with ₹40,000 saved, once burned by a chit-fund scam — takes one small, sovereign-safe step with the Floating-Rate Savings Bond.

RBI Retail Direct is a scheme the Reserve Bank launched so that an ordinary individual — not just a bank or a mutual fund — can buy government securities directly from the source. When you register, RBI opens you a Retail Direct Gilt account, usually shortened to an RDG account (a *gilt* is simply a government bond — the old British name for the gilt-edged, safest-possible IOU). Think of it as a demat account, but run by the Reserve Bank itself and holding only government paper.

The single most important word is directly. You are not buying units of a fund that owns bonds; you are not holding them through a broker who holds them through someone else. The security sits in *your* RDG account, in *your* name, on *RBI's own books.* You are the government's direct lender. That's why it's the safest and cheapest way to own government debt that exists in India — there's no middle layer to fail, and no middle layer to pay.

Check yourself before we go on: when you buy a G-Sec on RBI Retail Direct, what do you actually own — units of a fund, or the bond itself? (The bond itself, in your own name on RBI's books — that's the whole point of the 'direct' in Retail Direct.)

The RDG account isn't just for one kind of bond. Once it's open, five kinds of government paper are on the shelf — each one you already met in Lesson 33, now with a price tag and a minimum. Here's the whole menu, so you can see at a glance which tool fits which job.

Three things to read off that table. The minimum is tiny — ₹10,000 for a G-Sec, T-Bill or SDL (and in ₹10,000 steps after that), one gram for a gold bond, ₹1,000 for the savings bond. This isn't a rich person's club. The tenor tells you the job: a T-Bill (91 to 364 days) is for near-term parking; a G-Sec or SDL (years) is for locking income; the FRSB (7 years) is a savings bond that floats. And the way it pays differs: most pay a coupon twice a year, but a T-Bill pays no coupon at all — you buy it below ₹100 and it redeems at ₹100, and that gap is your return. We'll work exactly that maths on Lakshmi's T-Bill shortly.

The scheme is built for residents, and the eligibility list is short and ordinary. To open an RDG account you need: a rupee savings bank account in India, a PAN, any officially valid document for KYC (an Aadhaar does the job), a valid email, and a registered mobile number for OTPs. That's it — the same things you'd need to open any account online. You can open it singly or jointly (Lakshmi, say, could add her daughter as a joint holder), and adding a nominee is part of the flow.

The one genuine restriction is for NRIs (Non-Resident Indians). This is *not* an open door: RBI's rule allows only those non-resident investors who are already eligible to invest in government securities under FEMA (the Foreign Exchange Management Act) — a narrow, specific set of cases routed through NRO/NRE accounts, not 'any NRI with a PAN'. So the honest, practical summary is: treat RBI Retail Direct as a resident's tool. If you're an ordinary NRI, you generally can't just open one the way a resident can, and you'll use the NRI-specific routes instead.

Check: your cousin in Dubai asks you to open an RBI Retail Direct account so he can buy G-Secs. What do you tell him? (That it's built for residents — an ordinary NRI generally can't open one; his route is the NRI rulebook in Lesson 65. And nobody should be charging a fee to 'arrange' it.)

Opening the account is a single online session at rbiretaildirect.org.in — no branch visit, no courier, no signature to post. You fill five short blocks and confirm with an OTP. Because the fear here is operational ('which field, and what if I get it wrong?'), let's walk the actual screen, top to bottom, on Suresh's registration — with the four blocks that matter tinted.

Read it the way it's built. The applicant block just mirrors your PAN — name, PAN, date of birth, and whether you want a single or joint account; nothing to get wrong there. The four tinted blocks are the ones that actually do work. The linked bank account is the whole plumbing: one ordinary savings account that gets *debited* when you buy and *credited* with every coupon and the maturity amount — money out and money back through the same familiar account, no separate wallet. The Aadhaar e-KYC block is how you're verified — a paperless OTP to your own phone, the same login you already do for the tax portal — so there's no form to sign. The nominee block is a two-minute field that saves your family months: the nominee inherits the holdings without a court process (nomination versus a will is Lesson 53). And the RDG account block states the thing this whole lesson keeps promising — opening fee ₹0, maintenance fee ₹0.

Check: which one bank account does the RDG link to, and what does it do? (Your ordinary savings account — it's debited when you buy, and it receives every coupon and the maturity amount. One account, money out and back.)

Now the part that dissolves the fear entirely. Government bonds are sold at auctions — scheduled sales where the big players (banks, insurers, primary dealers) bid competitively, each naming a price or yield and a quantity, and RBI fills the best bids. If that were the only way in, you'd be right to be nervous: name your yield wrong and you either overpay or don't get any. But retail investors don't bid that way. You use a non-competitive bid, and it's designed so you can't lose that game.

Here's the whole idea in one sentence: you name only the amount you want, not a price — and you're allotted at the auction's weighted-average price. A slice of every auction is reserved for retail non-competitive bids; the system bundles all the retail bids together, and once the big institutions' competitive bidding has *settled* the price, you simply get that same result — specifically the weighted-average price of the successful competitive bids. You don't guess, you don't compete, you don't risk missing out on a technicality. You say 'I'll take ₹X of this bond,' and you get it at the price the market's experts just arrived at.

This is the reason a beginner can bid in a Reserve Bank auction with a completely steady hand. There is no price field for you to fill in wrong. The worst thing that can happen is that a particular auction is heavily subscribed and your full amount isn't allotted — in which case the un-allotted money simply comes back to your bank. You cannot overpay, you cannot 'bid at the wrong yield,' and you cannot lose money to a fat-fingered number, because there is no number to fumble. The term to keep: the weighted-average auction price is just the average price the winning competitive bids paid, and it's the price you inherit for free.

Let's make it concrete. Suresh wants a slice of steady, sovereign-safe income he can forget about for a decade, so he goes for a new 10-year G-Sec — call it the '6.75% GS 2036' (the '6.75%' is its coupon, '2036' the year it matures). He decides to put in ₹10,00,000 (₹10 lakh). Because the minimum is ₹10,000 and bids go up in ₹10,000 steps, that's exactly 100 lots of ₹10,000 — clean.

He places a non-competitive bid for that amount. He names no price. For a brand-new bond the auction's weighted-average price comes out at about ₹100 — par — so he pays about ₹10,00,000 for ₹10,00,000 of face value. (If it settled a rupee or two below par, RBI would refund the difference to his bank within a couple of working days.) Done. Now watch what that buys him.

So ₹33,750 lands in Suresh's bank account every six months — ₹67,500 a year — automatically, with no claim to file. That's the *income*. And the *capital* is just as certain: on the maturity date in 2036, his ₹10,00,000 face value comes back to his bank, whatever interest rates have done in the meantime. He has, in effect, locked a 6.75% return for ten years from the safest borrower in the country, for a ₹0 fee. What means what here: the 6.75% is his guaranteed annual yield because he's holding to maturity; the ₹33,750 is that yield turned into cash twice a year; and the reason it's *guaranteed* is that he owns the actual bond, not a fund whose price wanders.

Check: Suresh bids ₹10,00,000 non-competitively for a 6.75% G-Sec. Roughly what does he pay, what does he receive each year, and how? (About ₹10,00,000 at par; ₹67,500 a year in coupons — ₹33,750 credited to his bank every six months — with the ₹10,00,000 returned at maturity.)

The auction is the primary market — buying a bond fresh from the government. But there's a second door, and it matters the day you want something the auction can't give you: an *existing* bond between auction dates, or a way *out* before maturity. That door is NDS-OM — the Negotiated Dealing System, Order Matching — the market where already-issued government securities change hands between investors. Retail Direct plugs you into its odd-lot segment, sized for ordinary amounts (from ₹10,000, or one gram for a gold bond).

Two jobs live here. First, buying between auctions: if you want a specific bond today and there's no auction for it this week, you can buy it on NDS-OM from whoever's selling, at the going price. Second — and this is the one that quietly reassures people — selling before maturity. A G-Sec runs for years, but you're not locked in for years: if you need the money, you sell your holding on NDS-OM to another buyer at the current market price. It's your exit and your liquidity. Here are the two routes side by side, both feeding the one holding.

As the diagram shows, most beginners live on Route 1 — place a non-competitive bid, hold to maturity, collect coupons. Route 2 (NDS-OM) is the one you're grateful exists on the day you want to sell early or grab a specific bond off-auction. One honest caveat: the retail secondary market can be thinner than a big exchange — for an obscure security you might not find an instant buyer at a perfect price. That's a real difference from selling a popular stock, and it's exactly why, for money you know you'll hold to the end, the primary auction is the clean path. If you might need to sell early, a shorter bond, or the broker/ETF route we'll compare later, can suit better.

Suresh locked money away for a decade. Lakshmi has the opposite need. Living on her ₹95 lakh corpus and drawing ~₹50,000 a month, she keeps a buffer of cash for the next few months' expenses — money that must stay safe and reachable, not be tied up for years. Right now most of it sits in a savings account earning about 2.7%, quietly losing to inflation. A Treasury Bill is built for exactly this: near-term parking, sovereign-safe, at a much better rate.

A T-Bill works differently from a coupon bond, and the difference is the whole trick. It pays no coupon. Instead it's a zero-coupon instrument: you buy it at a discount — below its ₹100 face value — and at maturity it pays you the full ₹100. The gap between what you pay and the ₹100 you get back *is* your interest. Lakshmi picks a 91-day T-Bill and parks ₹2,00,000 of face value (that's 20 lots of ₹10,000).

So each ₹100 of this T-Bill costs her ₹98.6959 today. For ₹2,00,000 of face value she pays about ₹1,97,392 now, and in 91 days RBI pays her back the full ₹2,00,000. Her interest is the difference — about ₹2,608. That looks small, but it's over just three months: annualised, it works out to about 5.30% — the cut-off yield she bought at. Set against the savings account's ~2.7%, she's earning roughly double on money that's just as safe and just as short-term, with the Government of India as the borrower.

Check: Lakshmi's 91-day T-Bill has no coupon — so how does she make money on it? (She buys it at a discount, ₹98.6959 per ₹100, and it redeems at the full ₹100 in 91 days; the ₹2,608 gap is her return, about 5.30% annualised.)

There's one snag with using T-Bills for parking: a 91-day bill *ends* in 91 days. If Lakshmi wants to keep that money working, she'd have to remember, every three months, to log in and buy another one. For a 64-year-old managing her own money, that's exactly the kind of recurring chore that eventually gets forgotten. RBI fixed this. Since 6 August 2025, Retail Direct offers a T-Bill auto-bid — effectively a SIP for Treasury Bills.

You set it up once: choose the tenor (91-, 182- or 364-day), the amount, and the schedule, and the system automatically places a non-competitive bid for you each cycle — including reinvesting a maturing bill into a fresh one. Lakshmi switches it on for her buffer, and from then on her near-term cash rolls itself: a T-Bill matures, the money comes back, and a new bid goes in, all without her lifting a finger. The parking becomes as hands-off as a savings account, but at the T-Bill's rate.

Check: what does the T-Bill auto-bid actually do for Lakshmi? (It automatically places a fresh non-competitive T-Bill bid each cycle — reinvesting maturing bills — so her near-term parking rolls over on its own, like a SIP for T-Bills.)

You've now met both buys in words — Suresh's non-competitive G-Sec bid and Lakshmi's T-Bill. Here they are as the actual screens, plus the holdings view where they land. This is the artifact this lesson owns: three panels, every field shown, the parts that matter tinted. Read it slowly — once these three screens feel ordinary, the whole portal does.

Walk the tinted parts. On Suresh's bid screen, the line that matters most is the one that says *no price to quote — you're allotted at the auction's weighted-average price.* That's the fear-killer made visible: there's no box where a wrong number could cost you. Below it, the coupon block spells out the ₹33,750 every six months. On Lakshmi's T-Bill screen, the tinted rows are the discount price (₹98.6959) and the amount payable (₹1,97,392) against the ₹2,00,000 she gets back — the discount mechanic in plain figures. And on the holdings screen, the tinted rows are the next coupon-credit date and the maturity date: your bond, its face value, when the next ₹33,750 lands, and when the ₹10,00,000 returns.

Notice the two screens for the two people are the *same form* doing different jobs — one names a coupon bond, the other a discount bill, but both are 'non-competitive, name the amount, ₹0 fee.' The holdings screen then becomes your dashboard: what you own, when the money comes, and — if you ever need it — the button to sell.

This section is the direct answer to the fear in the title of this lesson — *what if my money gets stuck?* It doesn't, and here's the whole money-trail so you can see why. Two terms first. Settlement is the moment a trade actually completes — money moves one way, the security the other, and it lands in your holding. Coupon credit is the automatic deposit of your interest into your bank. Watch both play out on Suresh's bond.

Trace it: on auction day, Suresh's money leaves his bank to fund the bid — but until allotment it's merely earmarked, and if retail is under-subscribed it comes straight back. At settlement (the next working day), he's allotted at the weighted-average price and the bond lands in his RDG holding in his name; any excess between what he funded and the actual price is refunded to his bank within about two working days. Then, every six months, ₹33,750 is credited straight to his savings account — no form, no claim. And at maturity, the last coupon arrives *with* the ₹10,00,000 face value, and the holding closes. At no point is the money in limbo: it's either in his bank or in a government bond in his name.

Check: after Suresh's bid settles, does he have to do anything to get his interest, and could his money get 'stuck' in the portal? (No — ₹33,750 is credited to his bank automatically every six months, and the ₹10,00,000 comes back at maturity; if he ever wants out sooner he sells on NDS-OM. The money is never stuck.)

Imran is our most cautious character — a Lucknow schoolteacher with ₹40,000 saved, still stung by a neighbour's 'double-your-money' chit scheme that taught him to distrust anything that smells like investing. For someone like him, the right first step isn't a stock or even a fund — it's the most boring, most sovereign-safe, most *visible* thing on the rail. That's the Floating-Rate Savings Bond, the FRSB — a Government of India savings bond that also sits on this account.

It's simple by design: a 7-year government savings bond that pays interest every six months, straight to your bank. The word to learn is floating — the rate isn't fixed for the whole seven years. It resets every 1 January and 1 July to a formula: the National Savings Certificate rate plus 0.35%. Right now that's 7.70% + 0.35% = 8.05% (for January–December 2026). If NSC rises, your coupon rises; if NSC falls, it falls. Let's put Imran's tiny start on it.

Imran puts in a careful ₹10,000 (keeping the rest of his ₹40,000 as a buffer). At 8.05%, that earns ₹805 a year, arriving as ₹402.50 every six months in his bank. It's small — deliberately. What matters is the *feeling*: a government payout, on the dot, twice a year, that he can watch land. That's more than his bank FD (~6.5%), and just as safe. For someone burned by a scam, a boring, visible, sovereign coupon is the perfect antidote — it rebuilds trust with zero risk. The caveats are honest ones (shown on the card): the FRSB is not tradable (you can't sell it on NDS-OM — it's a savings bond, held to maturity, with only seniors getting an early exit), the rate floats (it can fall), and the interest is taxable at slab.

Check: the FRSB's rate is 8.05% today — is that locked for its 7-year life? (No — it 'floats', resetting every 1 January and 1 July to NSC + 0.35%. Today that's 8.05%; it can move up or down at each reset.)

We've said 'free' a dozen times; here's the precise version. RBI charges you nothing — nothing to open the RDG account, nothing to maintain it, nothing to place a bid. The only cost that can appear is a small third-party payment-gateway charge when you *fund* a purchase (the same kind of nominal fee any online payment can carry) — a few rupees, and never a fee to RBI. On Suresh's ₹10,00,000 G-Sec, that's a rounding error against the ₹67,500 a year he earns. Compare that with a gilt mutual fund quietly charging an expense ratio of, say, 0.6% a year — ₹6,000 every year on the same ₹10 lakh, win or lose. Over a decade, that's the difference the free rail keeps in your pocket.

So is Retail Direct simply better than buying government bonds through your demat/broker or a gilt fund? Not *simply* — it depends on the job. The RDG gives you direct ownership at zero cost, ideal for holding to maturity; the broker/fund route gives you convenience, liquidity and active management for a fee. Here they are honestly, side by side.

Read the verdict without tribalism. For a bond you'll hold to maturity at the lowest possible cost, the RDG wins outright — you own the paper and pay nothing. For active duration management (a manager steering the bonds as the rate cycle turns), one-login convenience (bonds beside your stocks and funds), or ETF-style liquidity (selling instantly in market hours), the broker or gilt-fund route earns its keep. Plenty of sensible investors use both: the RDG for a hold-to-maturity core, and a fund or ETF for the flexible part. The demat/broker account itself is Lesson 13; where a debt fund genuinely beats direct ownership is Lesson 36; assembling these holdings into a fixed-income ladder is Lesson 39.

Check: you want to own a specific G-Sec for ten years and pay as little as humanly possible — RDG or a gilt fund? (The RDG — you own the bond directly, hold it to maturity, and pay ₹0 to RBI, versus a fund's yearly expense ratio for something you don't need managed.)

Here's a move a private banker might make for a wealthy client and quietly bill for — and how you now do it yourself, for nothing.

The decoded move is plain: to earn a fixed, sovereign-safe income for a known horizon, the professional doesn't buy a gilt fund and pay a yearly fee — they open a free RDG and buy the bond directly, holding it to maturity. The logic is that a fund adds a recurring fee *and* a bouncing NAV to something you wanted simple, while a bond held to maturity just pays its coupon and returns your face value on the date printed. The do-it-yourself substitute is the free account you just learned to use. And the tell for whether a manager is worth the fee is even-handed: if all they offer is *access* to government bonds — which the free portal gives you — the fee isn't earned; a gilt fund is worth paying only for what the rail can't do (active management, daily liquidity, auto-reinvestment). 'It lets you buy G-Secs' is not, by itself, worth an annual cut — because now, so do you.

The word 'RBI' makes people lower their guard — which is exactly why fraudsters wrap it around a fake portal, a phishing link, and a fee to 'open' an account that's already free. Because this lesson sends you to a real government site with your PAN and bank details, it's the right moment to inoculate you against the counterfeits.

The three tells, in one breath: an 'RBI bonds' app or link that isn't the one real portal (there is exactly one — rbiretaildirect.org.in — plus the official app store; a lookalike domain or a sideloaded APK exists to harvest your PAN, bank and login); anyone asking for your OTP, password or PIN — even 'calling from RBI' — because RBI and the real portal *never* ask for the code that just landed on your phone; and an 'agent' who'll open your free account for a fee or promises returns above the real, public coupon. The defence is boringly effective: type the address yourself rather than clicking a link, never share an OTP, and remember that government-bond yields are printed on the RBI auction calendar, so nobody can secretly beat them for you.

Maybe you're reading this with a small wince of recognition — you've already avoided this rail, or paid too much to use it. That's common, it's forgivable, and none of it costs you what comes next. This is a different beat from the Scam Radar: that one is about someone trying to harm you; this is about your own honest missteps in a system that doesn't advertise how simple it is.

Whichever one is you — the savings account you kept because gilts felt too technical, the agent you paid to open a free account, the gilt fund you bought when you only wanted one bond to maturity, or the onboarding you abandoned at the OTP screen — set the blame down. There's no penalty for a late start on the RDG and no exam to pass; the account is free, a non-competitive bid can't be placed at the wrong price, and your money never leaves the government's hands. Finish the onboarding, place one small T-Bill or G-Sec, and let the coupon start landing. The hardest part was believing it's really this simple.

Now put it in your hands. This planner reproduces the three cast examples exactly, and lets you change any input. Pick the instrument, enter an amount (it snaps to the ₹10,000 lots the portal actually uses), and set the rate. For a G-Sec or the FRSB it shows the coupon and the half-yearly payout to your bank; for a T-Bill it shows the discount price, what you pay, what you get back, what you earn, and the effective yield. And it always shows the number of lots and the ₹0 RBI fee.

Play with the levers that teach the most. Load Lakshmi's T-Bill and push the tenor from 91 to 364 days — watch the discount deepen and the amount payable drop, because you're locking the rate for longer. Load Imran's FRSB and nudge the rate down to see how a floating coupon would shrink if NSC fell. Switch Suresh's G-Sec amount between ₹10,000 and ₹10,00,000 and watch the coupon scale in perfect step — while the fee stays stubbornly at ₹0. If you can predict what the planner will say before it says it, you're ready to open the real thing.

Is RBI Retail Direct really free? Yes. RBI charges nothing to open the account, maintain it, or place a bid. The only cost that can appear is a small third-party payment-gateway charge when you fund a purchase — a few rupees, never a fee to RBI. There is no annual maintenance charge and no brokerage.

What exactly is a non-competitive bid? It's the retail way of bidding in an RBI auction: you name only the *amount* you want, not a price or yield, and you're allotted at the auction's weighted-average price — the same price the big competitive bidders settled at. There's no price to guess, so you can't 'bid wrong'; the worst case is that a heavily-subscribed auction doesn't fill your whole amount and the rest returns to your bank.

Can NRIs use it? It's built for residents. Only non-residents already eligible to invest in G-Secs under FEMA qualify — a narrow set of cases, not 'any NRI'. As a practical rule, treat it as a resident's tool; the NRI routes are Lesson 65. Be wary of anyone offering to 'arrange' an NRI account for a fee.

How do I park cash in a T-Bill? Buy a 91-, 182- or 364-day Treasury Bill with a non-competitive bid (minimum ₹10,000). It's zero-coupon — you pay a discounted price (about ₹98.70 per ₹100 for a 91-day bill at ~5.30%) and get the full ₹100 back at maturity. To keep it rolling, switch on the T-Bill auto-bid so a fresh bill is bought each cycle automatically.

What if I need to sell before maturity? You sell on the secondary market, NDS-OM, to another investor at the going price. It's your exit and your liquidity — real, though the retail market can be thinner than a big stock exchange, so a specific bond may not sell instantly at a perfect price. For money you know you'll hold to the end, the primary auction is the clean path; if you might need to exit, a shorter tenor or the ETF route suits better.

When and how does the coupon reach me? Automatically, straight to the bank account you linked, every six months — no form, no claim. At maturity the face value is credited to the same account and the holding closes. A T-Bill has no coupon: you just get the full face value at maturity.

Is my money safe — who holds the bonds? You hold them, in your own name, in your RDG account on RBI's own books. The borrower is the Government of India, which is why these are the safest rupee assets there are (sovereign, not merely investment-grade). There's no broker or fund in the middle that could fail.

RDG or a gilt fund? For a bond you'll hold to maturity at the lowest cost, the RDG wins — direct ownership, ₹0 fee. A gilt fund earns its expense ratio only for active duration management, daily liquidity, or automatic reinvestment. Many people use both: the RDG for a hold-to-maturity core, a fund/ETF for the flexible part.

What's the FRSB, and is it just a fancy FD? The Floating-Rate Savings Bond is a 7-year Government of India savings bond paying half-yearly interest at a floating rate (NSC + 0.35%, currently 8.05%). Unlike an FD, the rate resets every six months and it's a government bond, not a bank deposit; unlike a G-Sec, it isn't tradable — you hold it (only seniors get an early exit). Its interest is taxable at slab.

Someone messaged me an 'RBI Retail Direct' app link — should I install it? No. Install only from the official app store, and reach the portal by typing rbiretaildirect.org.in yourself. Apps from links, and anyone asking for your OTP or a fee to open the account, are scams — report them to 1930 / cybercrime.gov.in.

• RBI Retail Direct — the Reserve Bank's scheme letting an individual buy government securities directly from the source, at zero RBI fees.
• RDG account (Retail Direct Gilt account) — the account RBI opens for you under the scheme; it holds your government securities in your own name on RBI's books ('gilt' = a government bond).
• Non-competitive bidding — the retail way to bid in an RBI auction: you name only the amount, not a price, and are allotted at the auction's weighted-average price — so there's no price to guess and no way to 'bid wrong'.
• Weighted-average auction price — the average price the winning competitive (institutional) bids paid in an auction; the price a non-competitive retail bidder is allotted at.
• NDS-OM (Negotiated Dealing System — Order Matching) — the secondary market where already-issued government securities are bought and sold between investors; Retail Direct plugs you into its retail-sized 'odd-lot' segment. It's also how you sell before maturity.
• Primary vs secondary market — primary = buying a bond fresh from the government at auction; secondary = buying or selling an existing bond from another investor (on NDS-OM).
• Treasury Bill (T-Bill) — short-term government paper (91/182/364 days) that pays no coupon: you buy it at a discount below ₹100 and it redeems at ₹100, so the gap is your return.
• T-Bill auto-bid / SIP — a feature (from 6 Aug 2025) that automatically places a recurring non-competitive T-Bill bid each cycle, so short-term parking rolls itself — a 'SIP for T-Bills'.
• FRSB (Floating Rate Savings Bond, 2020 – Taxable) — a 7-year Government of India savings bond paying half-yearly interest at a floating rate (NSC + 0.35%, ~8.05% now); not tradable, interest taxable at slab.
• Settlement — the moment a bond trade completes and the security lands in your holding (typically the next working day after the auction); any excess funding is refunded to your bank within ~2 working days.
• Coupon credit — the automatic deposit of your bond's half-yearly interest straight into your linked bank account.
• Direct vs demat (broker) gilt route — owning the bond itself on the free RDG (direct) versus holding a G-Sec in your demat or units of a gilt ETF/fund via a broker (for a fee, but with more convenience and liquidity).