Maharashtra books about a third of India's foreign direct investment. A reasonable suspicion is that much of it is foreign money buying Indian shares rather than building Indian factories. The suspicion is half right — but not in the way it is usually framed, and the precise answer turns out to be unobtainable from official data for a reason worth stating plainly.
RBI's Master Direction on Foreign Investment draws a bright line at 10% of post-issue paid-up equity on a fully diluted basis. At or above it, an inflow is FDI. Below it, the identical rupee is Foreign Portfolio Investment and sits in a different account entirely. DPIIT's own factsheet demonstrates the separation on its face: it carries FPI as a distinct column — "Investment by FPI's Foreign Portfolio investor Fund (net)" — sitting outside the Total FDI Inflow column.
So sub-10% buying of listed Indian shares never enters Maharashtra's ₹8,59,196 crore (USD 107,094 mn), cumulative October 2019 – March 2026, 31.35% of the national total.
DPIIT attributes an inflow to the state of the Indian company that receives the remittance, not the site of the project it funds. DPIIT's own phrasing for the Maharashtra deal list is "Remittance-wise – through Indian companies".
DPIIT's own top-five Maharashtra recipients show the artefact plainly:
| # | Recipient | Activity | Investor | Amount |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Reliance Retail Ventures | Storage & warehousing | Saudi PIF | ₹9,555 cr |
| 2 | Reliance Retail Ventures | Storage & warehousing | SLP Rainbow, Singapore | ₹8,813 cr |
| 3 | Ambuja Cements | Clinker & cement manufacture | Harmonia, Mauritius | ₹8,341 cr |
| 4 | Reliance Retail Ventures | Storage & warehousing | Qatar Holding | ₹8,278 cr |
| 5 | HDFC Credila | Other credit granting | Kopvoorn BV, Netherlands | ₹7,642 cr |
Three of the top four are stakes in a nationwide retail and warehousing group, booked 100% to Maharashtra because the recipient is Mumbai-registered — the warehouses they finance sit in every state. Number three is a cement company whose plants are mostly in Himachal, Gujarat, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh. Number five is a pure financial transaction with no physical project anywhere.
Going in, the obvious suspect was a large unallocated bucket quietly absorbing inflows. That was true historically and is now obsolete. In the legacy RBI regional-office series (April–June 2019), "Region not indicated" was 15.96% of all FDI equity inflow — larger than the entire Mumbai office at 9.60%. In the current state-wise series, "State Not Indicated" is 0.01%, and cross-checking the state table's total against DPIIT's annual series (~USD 341.6bn vs ~342.7bn) shows it now captures essentially 100% of national inflow.
The problem is not missing data. It is complete data assigned to the wrong geography.
DPIIT Table 6.3(i), FDI Synopsis on State – Maharashtra, October 2019 – December 2024:
Services, software and trading together are 42.5%, against 4.33% for automobiles — the only unambiguous manufacturing line in the published table. But note the second row: 16.13% is construction-infrastructure — ports, power, transmission — which is physical capital formation, just not the kind an Industrial Entrepreneur Memorandum records. So the mix splits three ways, not two: ~43% clearly non-physical (services/software/trading), ~16% physical infrastructure that the IEM cross-check below is blind to, ~4% manufacturing, and 37% unpublished (DPIIT prints only the top five sectors).
For context, construction-infrastructure is 6.9% of national FDI over the same window (real-estate development is a separate 0.6%), so Maharashtra's 16.13% is about 2.3× the national infrastructure rate — this is disproportionately a Maharashtra phenomenon.
DPIIT's FDI equity inflow explicitly includes the purchase of existing shares. The factsheet says so verbatim, identically, under the country, sector and state tables:
"%age worked out in USD terms & FDI inflow received through Government Route + Automatic Route + acquisition of existing shares only."
Buying shares from a selling shareholder transfers ownership and creates zero new capital formation — no plant, no job, no machine. DPIIT has booked even a USD 3.1bn pure share swap as equity inflow.
Where official FDI data is silent, implementation data is not. Setting DPIIT's FDI share against each state's share of industrial investment actually implemented (IEM Part B, five years) gives the best available proxy. Both series are shares of their own national total, so they sit on one scale.
Maharashtra takes 41% of tracked FDI but shows 12.7% of implemented industrial investment, and converts just 34.9% of its own stated investment intent into implementation — the weakest of the top four states.
Gujarat is the mirror image: 35% of implemented industrial investment on 13% of the FDI. Odisha is the extreme — 18% of implementation on 0.2% of FDI, an industrial economy essentially invisible to anyone reading FDI tables. Karnataka's 12.7× is the cleanest proof that this is a registered-office and services effect: Bengaluru's software FDI is real money that is not plant and machinery.