The decline witnessed in the market over the past weeks and in March particularly has been horrendous. Except for Hindustan Unilever (HUL), everything has been decimated by around 30-50 percent.

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In CNBC-TV18's special show titled Markets in Turmoil, Ajay Srivastava of Dimensions Corporate Finance Services and Sunil Singhania, Founder of Abbakkus Asset Management discuss the current market scenario and how best to navigate the big fall.

Singhania suggested that he has never witnessed this sort of outflow from emerging markets. “If you see the numbers, outflows from emerging market equity funds have been the highest ever we have seen in a month and significantly higher than what we saw post 9/11, 2001 or even post the Lehman Brothers in 2008-09. So, this $120-130 billion of redemption in emerging market funds is an all-time high and India being almost 10 percent weightage in that has seen almost $10 billion worth of selling,” he said.

However, on the domestic mutual funds, Singhania said that the March SIP numbers have been constant. “As far as domestic mutual funds are concerned, the reassuring thing is that the March SIP numbers have been pretty decent and though on the HNI side there have been some redemptions on a net level, the inflows continue,” he added.

Next, Srivastava said, “It is not about where you are invested or not invested, it is what segment are you exposed to and what is going to happen to the economy as it turns around. I think that is the key question.”

He also spoke about how the government would manage the bill due to the COVID-19 shutdown. “Who will pay the bill for this COVID-19 rescue plan for the economy? Somebody has got to pay the bill ultimately. Fiscal deficit will play its role and we have already seen one of the insidious effects of that in the yields going up. The critical question for government to clarify is who is going to pay the bill, is it going to be the liquor companies, is it going to be the tobacco companies, is it going to be the two-wheeler, is it going to be expensive consumer durables. Once that policy is clear that the Rs 2-4 lakh crore is going to come from this part of the economic system, then the stock market decision makes more sense,” he said.

He lastly advised to stick to large caps. “In an environment like this, the best course of action is and if you really want to invest, then the right place to invest in my view is you should stick to the big caps that you do not have in your portfolio. Eventually they will survive, you may have a longer run to recover the money, but as an investor I would say wait for the government policy because someone is going to foot the bill for this Rs 2-4 lakh crore package and we need to figure out which set of companies it is going to be,” he said.