Comments on the Securities Market Code Bill, 2025
Finance is the brain of the economy. The Securities Market Code Bill is a step forward. It strengthens governance and formalises regulation-making. There is too much power concentrated at SEBI; there is not enough check-and-balance; and the bill makes things worse. When state agencies have more power, state capability goes down. Natasha Aggarwal, Pratik Datta, K. P. Krishnan, Bhavin Patel, M. S. Sahoo, Renuka Sane, Bhargavi Zaveri-Shah and I lay out what needs to change in the Securities Market Code Bill, 2025, on The Leap Blog.
India’s energy ambitions
In the article Evaluating India’s Energy Ambitions: Evidence from Electricity Generation Project-Level Data, published on The Leap Blog, Upasa Borah, Akshay Jaitly and Renuka Sane unveil an important new paper. They study how electricity generation projects evolve from announcement to completion. They use project-level data from the CMIE CapEx database covering 8,540 projects announced between 1957 and 2024, and find a large gap between what is announced and what gets built: only 15% of announced conventional capacity and 9% of announced renewable capacity has been completed. Applying a survival model to projects in the pipeline, they find India is likely to fall short of its 500 GW non-fossil target by around 77 GW. The challenge is not the ambition of announcements, but rather whether projects get implemented and completed on time.
Arbitration deadlines
Section 29A of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act sets time limits for arbitral awards. Courts can sanction delay. In practice, they do not. Prashant Narang and Renuka Sane have a new paper where they look at 202 Delhi High Court orders between 2015 and 2024. Extensions were granted in 198 cases. Fee reductions in zero. Imposing a penalty is hard. Granting an extension is easy. Courts choose easy. A deadline without consequences is not a deadline. Their unveiling of the paper is at What happens when arbitration deadlines are missed, on The Leap Blog.
Natasha Aggarwal
Natasha Aggarwal got an author page on The Leap Blog.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.