Pressing ahead for change

The Kotak Committee has made wide-ranging recommendations and sees the boards and auditors as the two critical gatekeepers

Thanks to seven corporate governance committees, a new Companies Act and new listing regulation, all over the last two decades, India ticks most boxes with regard to protection of minority investor rights. The World Bank’s Doing Business 2017 report ranks India at #13 out of 190 countries (India’s overall Doing Business rank, in sharp contrast, is 130).

Yet, every few quarters there is a governance event — an outlandish related party transaction, or compensation that has no bearing on the job, or a CEO defenestrated, which put companies under a fresh bout of scrutiny. A series of such events creates a