SEBI on insider trading and 'finfluencers', AI sovereignty, Personal insolvency, NBFCs, Nuclear energy, and our first Git repo | The TrustBridge Newsletter | Issue 15
SEBI’s Adjudication of Insider Trading | Regulating 'finfluencers' | SEBI's regulation of platforms and influencers | RBI's regulation of NBFCs | Nuclear energy | GitHub repo - APTEL data
This is TrustBridge’s monthly newsletter. TrustBridge seeks to improve India’s business environment by improving the rule of law. In this monthly newsletter, we bring you the work done by the TrustBridge Team in the public space and offer insights into future work.
Talks and panel discussions
Renuka Sane presented a paper “Balancing Power and Accountability: An Evaluation of SEBI’s Adjudication of Insider Trading” at a seminar organised at the Centre for Social and Economic Progress on October 28, 2024. A recording of the presentation and discussion is available here.
Bhavin Patel presented a talk on “Using LLMs for large-scale regulatory order analysis” at the Centre for Social and Economic Progress on October 29, 2024.
Renuka Sane participated in a 2-day workshop, AI Sovereignty: Policy Pathways for the Future, organised by Digital Futures Lab and Samagata on November 7-9, 2024.
Natasha Aggarwal participated in a panel discussion, SEBI Platform and Influencer Regulations, organised by MediaNama on November 8, 2024. Details of this panel discussion are available here. A video is available at the link below:
Publication
Renuka Sane’s and Madhav Goel’s paper, ‘Lost in Translation: Legislative Drafting and Judicial Discretion’, the first TrustBridge Working Paper, has been published in Volume VI of the NLU, Delhi Journal of Legal Studies.
Op-eds
Karan Gulati, Chitrakshi Jain and Anjali Sharma wrote an article for The Leap Blog: ‘Early evidence from the personal insolvency framework in India’, on October 20, 2024.
In 2015, the BLRC had insisted that corporate insolvency provisions are incomplete without a personal insolvency framework. The PGPs that have resulted in approved repayment plans under the IBC have shown limited effectiveness as a value discovery mechanism for lenders and guarantors. Given that many PGs have been unable to fulfil their obligations under the repayment plan and have subsequently filed for bankruptcy, it remains to be seen how extending the coverage of the personal insolvency framework will balance the interests of the debtors and creditors. A careful evaluation of the process of insolvency should be conducted before the IBC framework is extended to all classes of personal debtors.
Renuka Sane wrote two articles for The Print:
‘RBI order restricting 4 NBFC operations lacks clarity. It won’t help customers, companies’, on October 23, 2024.
Regulatory actions serve important signals not just for the specific entity but the market too. When the regulator clearly articulates the principles it has applied, other regulated entities in similar situations get informed on what is acceptable and what isn’t. Perhaps there are informal channels in Mumbai where the rationale for regulatory actions is known and discussed, and one just has to be plugged into the network to know what is going on. However, that cannot be the basis of regulation in an aspirational economy.
‘Nuclear power is cleaner, more reliable than solar energy. India must ease regulations’, on November 6, 2024.
Investors across the world are increasingly allocating resources toward both solar and nuclear energy. Regulators are addressing safety and liability concerns. However, the policy landscape for nuclear energy in India remains restrictive, which deters private sector involvement. While safety is paramount, easing regulatory constraints could unlock critical flows of private investment and foreign expertise.
Akshay Jaitly and Ajay Shah wrote an article for the Business Standard: ‘Enabling conditions for nuclear energy: Five key tasks for policymakers’, on November 11, 2024.
The field of nuclear electricity is opening up worldwide with important improvements in cost and safety. Nuclear energy in India could make important contributions to solving the problems of base load and grid stability, and creating conditions for more renewables. It is private persons that must make the risky investment of buying these plants. We are headed to a world with renewables generation and a variety of storage technologies that hold down the evening surge in the price. Private persons who have a speculative view that storage will work poorly, that the evening surge will be quite considerable, may like to place the bet of buying nuclear reactors. Picking winners and choosing technologies are the job of such private speculators and not the state.
We are on GitHub!
The database from our study of appeals from orders of the Tamil Nadu State Electricity Regulatory Commission (TNERC) before the APTEL is now on GitHub as APTEL_repo! We’re ‘commit’ed to making our data and findings available for public use, and this is a ‘push’ in that direction. Follow us on GitHub so we can ‘pull’ you in on updates when we share more data, code, and other information.