The recent NSE fiasco indicates a larger systemic problem: there is a general malaise, seeping deep among India’s sectoral regulators.
By now, you might have heard that the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) has finally passed its order after looking into the major irregularities—suspicious appointments, trips to tax havens by senior management, preferential access to certain brokers, mysterious emails from yogis, etc.—at the National Stock Exchange (NSE). It is a different matter that the order is far from satisfactory and comes more than six years after the initial complaints were made to SEBI and long after a series of investigative reports by Moneylife—the consumer advocacy organization that brought NSE’s lapses into public discourse.
It is disappointing, yes, …
Rohit Chandra is an assistant professor at IIT Delhi’s School of Public Policy and also a visiting fellow at the Centre for Policy Research. Primarily a political scientist and economic historian, his academic work spans the areas of energy policy, state capitalism and infrastructure finance; he has spent the last decade studying the coal and power sectors.
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