Enforcement at SEBI; The financing of regulators; Gen 0 women from IIT Bombay
Enforcement at SEBI
Regulators in India are increasingly the tip of the spear of state control over private persons. In recent research, Devendra Damle and Bhargavi Zaveri Shah constructed a novel dataset of 8,000 orders that have come out from SEBI and subjected this to analysis. The authors have a complete release with a paper, the dataset, and an unveiling article.
They establish an array of important facts. As an example, I did not know that in 2019 (the last pre-pandemic year), SEBI issued 1250 orders or roughly 5 orders per day. While the SEBI Act requires the adjudicating officer to assign monetary penalties in proportion to the magnitude of the unfair gain made by the accused, in 90% of the orders this is not done.
The financing of regulators
How does a regulator secure funding? Ordinarily, a regulator should be funded through the budget, just like any other government agency. The UK FSA had a fee that was charged to financial firms, and in the bargain they were able to diverge from the standard wages of civil servants. In India, this has been a problematic area. Regulators funded by the department have faced the normal difficulties of Indian public finance. Regulators that have established independent fee based revenue streams have become attracted to empire building, as is predicted by public choice theory given the weaknesses of the board and budgeting processes.
On 22 September, Rishika Rangarajan published an article Preparing for financially self-reliant and accountable regulators, on The Leap Blog, which has a first full treatment of these questions.
The field of regulation in India
Both these papers fall in the important field of understanding the difficulties of regulators in India, and finding the path to state capacity. I have been teaching a flipped classroom lecture on this field, and the associated slideshow shows the literature and the research community. While this slideshow was made on 27 June, it is lagging the new research that has come out since: the evaluation of IBBI and the two products above.
Gen 0 women from IIT Bombay
IIT Bombay recently collected the life stories of 30 interesting women who graduated prior to 2000. Susan Thomas is one of them. There is a main page, a PIB press release, a coffee table book and a collection of video interviews.