Every listed Indian company discloses, on a quarterly basis, exactly who holds its shares, broken into four standard categories: promoter holding (the company's founders, their families, and entities they control), FII holding (Foreign Institutional Investors — overseas institutional entities registered to hold positions in Indian markets), DII holding (Domestic Institutional Investors — India-registered entities such as mutual funds, insurance companies, and banks), and public holding (everyone else, including individual retail investors). The four categories together always account for the entirety of a company's outstanding shares.

Because this is disclosed quarterly rather than continuously, a shareholding pattern reflects a specific reporting date, not a live figure — the trend across several reporting dates over time is more informative than any single date read alone, since a change of a few percentage points can happen gradually or can happen all at once, and only comparing dates shows which.

Promoter pledging is a separate figure reported alongside promoter holding: the percentage of a promoter's own shares that have been pledged — used as collateral against a loan taken by the promoter or a related entity, rather than by the company itself. A pledge means those particular shares now also secure someone else's borrowing. If the value of the pledged shares falls significantly, or the loan isn't serviced, the lender holding the pledge can act on that pledge, which can include disposing of the pledged shares, to recover what's owed. This app flags a company's promoter pledge level when it crosses a set threshold — a factual disclosure about a mechanism that exists in the shareholding data, not an assessment of the company itself, and the flag appears the same way regardless of the reason a particular promoter chose to pledge shares.

Reading shareholding data usefully means treating each category as what it actually measures: promoter holding shows ownership concentration and how much of the company insiders continue to hold; institutional holding (FII plus DII) shows how much of the company is held by entities that, by regulation, disclose their positions and generally have research and due-diligence processes behind their holdings; and public holding is simply the residual category — neither a positive nor a negative signal in itself, since it captures every individual and entity not otherwise classified.