Scheme Universe Field Guide

How Scheme Categories Work

All scheme metadata is parsed from AMFI's official files, the daily NAVAll.txt for live schemes, plus AMFI's historical NAV archives for matured schemes (added in the July 2026 backfill; see Data Coverage below). In both, each scheme appears under a header line like:

Open Ended Schemes(Equity Scheme - Large Cap Fund)
Open Ended Schemes(Debt Scheme - Short Duration Fund)
Open Ended Schemes ( Growth )          <- old-style, pre-SEBI 2018

The parser extracts fields from this header. Modern headers (post-SEBI 2018 recategorization) have a clear Group - Sub-Category structure. Older headers use single words like Growth, Income, or Gilt with no sub-category.

Field Reference

Category (category_group_clean) - The Right Field to Use

This field groups all 38,000+ schemes into 4 standardized categories: Equity Scheme, Debt Scheme, Hybrid Scheme and Other Scheme. For modern schemes, the value derives from the AMFI header text, the part before the - separator. For the 26,000+ older schemes (the majority, now that the historical backfill includes every matured scheme since 2006), we apply a manual mapping from legacy single-word names to modern equivalents. Since the SEBI Feb-2026 recategorization, the new AMFI group headers (e.g. Income/Debt Oriented Schemes, Equity Schemes, Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs), Life Cycle Funds) also map into these same 4 groups, and the discontinued Solution Oriented category plus Fund of Funds sit under Other Scheme. Their schemes remain fully findable via the raw category fields and sub-categories.

Approximate counts as of late July 2026; they grow with daily syncs and shift as fund houses re-file under the SEBI Feb-2026 framework through late August 2026.

Old-to-Modern Mapping Table

Sub-Category (category_sub) - The Right Field to Use

The SEBI sub-category, extracted from the text after - in the AMFI header. For example, from Equity Scheme - Large Cap Fund, the sub-category is Large Cap Fund. There are 50+ distinct sub-category values across all schemes: the SEBI Feb-2026 recategorization renamed many categories (Short Duration Fund became Short Term Fund, Dynamic Bond became Dynamic Term Fund, and so on), and old and new names coexist as-filed while fund houses re-file through late August 2026. The app treats each rename pair as one category in analytics.

For old-style schemes (pre-SEBI 2018), the AMFI header has no - separator, it is just a single word like Growth or Income. Where the old name maps unambiguously to a single SEBI sub-category, we auto-assign it: ELSS -> ELSS, Liquid -> Liquid Fund, Gilt -> Gilt Fund, Money Market -> Money Market Fund, Floating Rate -> Floater Fund. For ambiguous old categories like Income or Growth (which span multiple modern sub-categories), category_sub remains blank. When filtering by sub-category, those schemes will not appear.

Data Quality Cleanup

AMFI's source text contains minor inconsistencies that we fix during sync: Other ETFs (double space) is normalized to Other ETFs, and Sectoral/ Thematic (space after slash) is normalized to Sectoral/Thematic, and a curly-apostrophe variant of Children's Fund is normalized to the straight-apostrophe form. These corrections are applied automatically during the daily sync pipeline.

Examples of sub-categories: Large Cap Fund, Mid Cap Fund, Small Cap Fund, Flexi Cap Fund, Short Duration Fund, Liquid Fund, Gilt Fund, Aggressive Hybrid Fund, Arbitrage Fund, Retirement Fund, Sectoral/Thematic, Index Funds, ELSS, and others.

Category Group (category_group) - Avoid Using

This is the raw group text parsed from the AMFI header, before any mapping. For 2017-era modern schemes it usually matches category_group_clean (e.g., Equity Scheme, Debt Scheme). For old-style schemes it shows the original AMFI name (e.g., Growth, Income, Gilt), and since mid-2026 it also carries the new SEBI Feb-2026 headers (Equity Schemes, Income/Debt Oriented Schemes, Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs), Life Cycle Funds), all of which map into the 4 clean groups.

This field is kept for validation and audit purposes. It lets you see the original AMFI classification before our mapping. There are 20+ distinct raw values (growing through the SEBI Feb-2026 transition) versus 4 clean values. For any analysis or comparison, use category_group_clean instead.

Amber rows = old-style AMFI names that required manual mapping.

Category Full Text (category) - Avoid Using

The complete inner text from the AMFI header. For modern schemes, this is the full Group - Sub-Category string (e.g., Equity Scheme - Large Cap Fund, Debt Scheme - Short Duration Fund). For old-style schemes, it is just the single word (e.g., Growth, Income).

This field is redundant, it is simply category_group + - + category_sub concatenated. Use category_group_clean and category_sub separately instead. The full text field exists for reference and debugging only.

Example: Modern vs Old-Style Scheme

Data Source

All metadata comes from AMFI's official public files: the daily NAVAll.txt (synced 3 times a day) plus AMFI's historical NAV archives (loaded once in the July 2026 backfill, see below). The scheme_meta table in amfi_nav_master.duckdb contains 38,000+ schemes from 70+ AMCs, covering NAV data from April 2006 to present. Category mapping (old-to-modern groups), sub-category assignment (for unambiguous old-style categories), and text cleanup (spacing inconsistencies) are all applied during the sync process and are deterministic, the same input always produces the same output.

Data Coverage & the July 2026 Backfill

The history, in simple words. This database was originally built on AMFI's daily NAVAll.txt file, which covers schemes that are alive and publishing NAVs. That gave us open-ended schemes with history from January 2013 onward. Two things were missing: schemes that had already matured (a closed-ended FMP that ended in 2015 never appears in a 2026 daily file), and the pre-2013 history of funds that are still running today.

What we added on 15 July 2026. AMFI also publishes historical NAV archives, organized by scheme type (open-ended, close-ended, and interval schemes, the tp=1/2/3 parameters visible in AMFI's own download URLs). We downloaded the complete archives back to April 2006 (the earliest date AMFI serves) and merged them in: about 16.4 million NAV records and 19,951 schemes that existed in the past but not in our database, including funds from houses that no longer exist (ABN AMRO, Fortis, Standard Chartered, Benchmark and others). Open-ended history for today's funds now reaches back to April 2006, and every matured closed-ended and interval scheme is included.

How it was validated. Nothing was bulk-appended blindly. Every download window was profiled (row counts, date spans, blank and duplicate checks) before anything moved. The merge ran as seven separate batches, each with a before-and-after cross-tab by year and scheme type where every single cell had to reconcile exactly (before + added = after) or the batch stopped. Inserts were strictly additive: where a record already existed, the existing value always won, the roughly 27,900 overlapping records between the two AMFI sources were compared, and the 9 disagreements (0.03%, mostly rounding differences between AMFI's own two feeds) were kept on the daily file's value and logged for manual review, never silently changed.

What this means for the data you see. Categories for historical schemes were re-derived through the same deterministic mapping the daily sync uses, with a manually reviewed mapping table for 12 legacy category labels. Matured schemes are marked inactive (is_active = false). Old closed-ended schemes often published NAVs weekly rather than daily, that was the market practice of the era, not missing data. And scheme counts on this page are as of 2026-07-15; they grow a little every day as new schemes launch.

See Also: Where to Go Next

This guide covers how to read the scheme universe. The companion pages: the Data Dictionary documents every field of the NAV database with types and caveats, and How the Data Is Built explains the sources, the sync, the July 2026 backfill, the AUM figures and the validation discipline.

For programmatic access, the NAV API reference covers single and bulk NAV, search and downloads; the self-describing catalog lives at https://api.tigzig.com/mf/v1/. And to get the whole scheme universe as one small file, current names, categories, latest NAV and latest AAUM included, download the scheme master snapshot: GET /mf/v1/download?format=latest, also available on the app's Data & API tab.