The objective of this study is to ascertain the implications of share pledging on different types of firms in India, with special focus on family firms. The various scandals, loss of control of the firm by family promoters, regulatory responses and warnings led to the common perception that all share pledges by promoters are bad. Existing empirical research around pledging of shares has also failed to account for the heterogeneity among the possible use-cases of capital obtained from pledging of shares. The report calls for more nuanced studies on pledging to explore this anomaly contextually and to avoid painting all cases with the same brush.