Can NRI do trading in India?

An NRI can do delivery-based trading in India on repatriation or non-repatriation basis. An NRI cannot do short-selling.

An NRI can invest in the stock market under the Portfolio Investment Scheme (PIS) of the RBI. The PIS approval is mandatory to trade with repatriation benefits and thus requires the NRE PIS bank account to be linked with NRE Demat and NRE trading account to start investing.

With the recent change in RBI rules, the PIS requirement has been waived for NRO mode of transactions and thus an NRI can start investing without repatriation benefits by linking NRO Non-PIS bank account with NRO Demat and NRO trading account. Though RBI has eased the requirement of PIS for NRO mode, many brokers still insist to trade using the PIS route to avoid the responsibility of TDS calculation complexity and deduction which is difficult to be managed with existing capacity that is currently done by PIS banks.