The gap between Regular and Direct of the same fund is the distributor commission baked into the price you are paying. On a typical large-cap active fund that gap is 60 to 80 bps. If you are not getting advice worth that much every year, you are tipping someone for a screen you could read yourself.
Sitting just below the TER on every factsheet. Active funds rotate 30 to 60 pct of holdings a year. The brokerage and STT on that churn comes out of the NAV silently, not on a separate line on your statement. High turnover plus a high TER is paying for activity twice.
178 bps a year on a ten-lakh corpus is not Rs 17800 for five years. It is closer to Rs 95000 of forgone compounding. Cost is the only line that compounds against you with the same patience your returns compound for you.