"It is with an idea to increase the awareness among intermediaries and to educate them about mutual funds that we are undertaking this training programme," said Kurian. The training will give the intermediaries a detailed insight into both the conceptual as well as organisational and technical working of mutual funds.

"The idea is to increase and upgrade the skills, enhance the knowledge and quality level of intermediaries. Selling a mutual fund is not an easy task and requires a lot of conceptualand specialised knowledge and skills," said Kurian.

With the same agents selling products of the banking sector, insurance sector and non-banking finance companies and other products, the intermediaries are not making enough endeavour to sell funds. Kurian said that they need to educate these intermediaries on the returns, the risk, the time period of investment, how the net asset value is calculated, the kind of commission, the investment strategy of mutual funds and other things.

"There has been a big lacunae in the market as far as imparting the basic skills and knowledge to these intermediaries about mutual funds is concerned, with the main question as to whom to turn to even if an intermediary is willing to learn about mutual funds, remaining unaddressed," said Kurian. Amfi has now taken this up as a thrust area and after covering Mumbai would subsequently go to other metros and regional centres like Nagpur, Pune, Ahmedabad and Hyderabad to impart education to agents there.

The training sessionswill be taken by the professionals of mutual fund industry like the president of Alliance Capital Mutual Fund Ajai Kaul, Templeton Asset Management Company chief executive officer Vijay Advani, Kothari Pioneer Mutual Fund chief executive officer Vivek Reddy and other eminent personalities from the fund industry. Intermediaries have an important, kinetic and key role in attracting investors to mutual funds and it is high time that some one took an initiative to school the agents about the concept of mutual fund, said Kurian. In another move, Amfi has, for the first time, come out with a comprehensive data on the mutual fund industry giving annual and quarterly data about the industry. The data is segregated into various categories with a complete statistical picture of the industry, and the inflow and outflow to the industry in the last year and the quarter April-June, 1998. The Amfi chairman says that the newsletter would now be made on a regular basis.