The panorama of investment options provided to investors by Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) and their remarkable rise since their introduction in the nation have made an assessment of existing literature on ETFs in India necessary. In the light of these developments, the present study focuses on previous research conducted by different researchers to comprehend the performance of equity based mutual funds in India. The aim of this paper is to examine the corpus of work that may be found in both national and international peer-reviewed journals, seminars and conference proceedings. It look at abroad range of research on topics such as risk return relationship, investment goals, investment time horizon, investment kind and market volatility that support investing in equity based mutual fund schemes. It has been found that most of the exchange traded funds (ETFs) fared better than their underlying indices.