Mutual fund industry has experienced a drastic growth within the past twenty years. Increase within the number of schemes with increased mobilization of funds in the past few years provide benefits to the importance of Indian mutual funds industry. To satisfy the expectations of many retail investors, the mutual funds are required to function as successful institutional investors. Proper assessment of varied fund performance and their comparison with other funds helps retail investors for creating investment decisions. This paper examines the performance of mutual fund schemes compares these returns with SBI domestic term deposit rates. While considering the interest of retail investors simple statistical techniques like averages and rate of returns are used. The results obtained from the study clearly depicts that, in most of the cases the mutual fund schemes have failed even to supply the return of SBI domestic term deposits.