Thanks for the confirmation with regards to Rs.20 per order. You're right, I found this page, which lists the intraday & overnight margins for all of the NSE futures tradeable with them -
https://www.interactivebrokers.co.i...1|0|0|0|0|0|1|0|0|0|1|0|0|0|1|0|0|0|1|0|0|0|1 So, for Nifty & Banknifty, they're charging 48k & 60k for intraday & 95k & 121k overnight whereas margins for some stock-futures are inexplicably high, like Ajantpharm future has an intraday margin-requirement of 239k & 478k overnight, it's almost like buying the whole thing in the cash-market.
I'd read somewhere on the Internet that they have weird, sophisticated algorithms to manage their own risk with respect to clients ending up owing money to them due to major losses, so they maintain higher margin-requirements for certain instruments which they believe to be likely to suddenly move big. So yes, their margins seem to be between 50% to 100% of SPAN, & even exceed SPAN on some futures, which is something they might need to reconsider if they really want to give Indian brokers a run for their money, which is what they seem to be wanting to do with this latest revision in their brokerage-structure.
Another thing that's going to be a huge problem for them to attract Indian traders is their very high net-worth requirements but here, it says that the requirements are not applicable for IB India accounts (although I don't know if that means SOME OTHER net-worth requirements are applicable for IB India accounts) -
https://www.interactivebrokers.co.in/en/index.php?f=accountConfiguration&p=tradingrequirements but the last time I called them up, a few months ago, they said that one'd have to show proofs of $30,000 net-worth to trade F&O on NSE but I hope they have revised that policy as well along with their brokerage. Personally, I think minimum capital requirement of 1 lac isn't that bad if IB wants to avoid really small, high-risk traders, & I think there might be enough traders who can put in a deposit of 1 lac with IB if it means trading on a reliable & feature-rich platform like TWS but I'm not sure how many would want to put up with steep margin-requirements or show proofs of $30,000 in net-worth.
That's interesting because I'd read that their intraday cut-off time was 2:30 p.m. but I presume they have revised it to 3:15 p.m. And, another thing someone else pointed out to me was that they charge Rs.2000 for call & trade!
Anyway, thanks again for all of the information.