Indian residents can legally own shares in US-listed companies. The route runs through the Reserve Bank of India's Liberalised Remittance Scheme (LRS), which permits remittances of up to USD 250,000 per individual per financial year for permitted purposes, including overseas equity investment.
What tends to stop people is not the legality but the mechanics: which account holds the shares, how rupees become dollars, what the true cost of a trade is once forex markup and TCS are counted, and what happens to the holding if something goes wrong at the broker. Fractional shares change the arithmetic too — a share trading at USD 600 is no longer out of reach for someone investing ₹5,000 a month.
The articles below work through each of those in turn, starting with the end-to-end process and then going deeper on the questions that come up once money is actually moving.