There’s a comparison floating around showing Dream11 vs demat accounts as roughly similar. It doesn’t paint the real difference.
Demat accounts are 18.5 crore overall but only about half are unique individuals. Dream11 accounts are probably all unique. So it’s not roughly equal - there are about twice as many people with Dream11 accounts as with demat accounts.
Make of that what you will.
The demat number overstates investors. CDSL and NSDL both count accounts, and plenty of people have two or three, opened for an IPO or an offer and forgotten. Inactive and duplicate accounts sit inside the 18.5 crore. Unique PAN-linked individuals are roughly half.
Dream11 is the opposite. KYC and PAN linking make duplicate accounts hard, so its count is close to unique people. On a like-for-like basis, roughly twice as many Indians have a fantasy account as have a demat account.
I don’t read this as moral decline. A Dream11 account takes two minutes and ₹100. A demat account takes documents, a bank link, and the belief that markets are for people like you. The gap measures friction and trust more than appetite for risk. The appetite, clearly, is already there.
Some of it does graduate. The person learning probability on a fantasy app is the same person who ends up in his first index fund a few years later.