The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Finance has sought clarifications from the Economic Affairs Secretary on the proposed Securities Market Code Bill as it moves towards finalising its draft report. The committee is yet to incorporate 26 residual clauses before submitting its recommendations to Parliament during the first week of the upcoming Monsoon Session.
Parliamentary Standing Committee on Finance Chairman Bhartruhari Mahtab said the Economic Affairs Secretary was invited to explain the pending provisions that could not be cleared during the panel's previous meeting.
"There were certain residual clauses which could not be approved the other day, the last meeting that we had, which covered around 26 clauses. That's why we had called the Economic Affairs Secretary and she came and explained to us all the residual issues that were pending. We had actually scheduled it today," Mahtab said.
The committee deliberated on the draft report during Friday's meeting but decided to defer its formal adoption until the remaining provisions are incorporated into the document.
"We discussed the draft agenda today, but we did not approve it because the issues of around 26 clauses which were left earlier have to be incorporated in the draft. Those clauses will be added into our draft report and hopefully next week when we will be meeting on Tuesday we will be adopting that report," Mahtab said.
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He added that the committee aims to submit the final report to Parliament by the end of the first week of the Monsoon Session.
"So our target is by the first week of the monsoon session for submission," he said.
Highlighting the scale of the review process, Mahtab said the proposed Securities Market Code Bill underwent extensive scrutiny by the committee, with nearly 1,000 suggestions received from stakeholders on the Bill's 157 clauses. He noted that the government has accepted more than 85 of those recommendations.
"We had given around 1000 suggestions, out of which more than 85 have been accepted by the government," he said. "That's a very good number and out of 157 clauses of this bill, we had suggested around some thousand changes and 85 of them have been accepted."
Mahtab clarified that these suggestions were not recommendations made exclusively by committee members but were gathered through extensive consultations with a broad spectrum of stakeholders during the examination of the proposed legislation.
"When I say 1,000 suggestions were given to them, it was not given by the committee itself. The number of stakeholders that we interacted with, they had given a number of suggestions....We interacted with RBI, with SEBI and with a number of chartered accountants and those who deal with Stock Exchanges; Even with investors and banks," he said.
According to Mahtab, the committee's detailed examination of the Bill helped uncover several issues and omissions in the original draft, resulting in significant revisions before the legislation moves forward.
"Lot of changes have taken place from the previous version and I can tell you aside is that number of officers have stated privately that they had conceived the bill fool-proof but the issues that were brought up by honorable members in the committee actually showed that number of issues also have been left out," he said.
He added that many of these concerns have since been addressed in the revised draft, reflecting the value of the consultative process undertaken by the committee.
"So they have been incorporated, that's why more than 85 suggestions have been accepted by the committee," Mahtab said. The committee is now expected to meet again next week to consider the updated draft report incorporating the remaining clauses. Once adopted, the report will be submitted to Parliament, marking the completion of the panel's review of the proposed Securities Market Code Bill before its presentation during the Monsoon Session.
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