Indian regulators - SEBI, PFRDA and IRDAI, have all mandated stewardship, and this is a welcome step. But in having each regulator requiring this, we have a fragmented stewardship. The regulators need to work together and have one stewardship code for India. Investors will welcome it. India’s experience with stewardship first began in March 2010, when SEBI asked mutual funds to have a voting policy and to start voting. Having set the ball rolling Securities and Exchange Boa

MNCs’ payments to parent companies are legitimate, but the brand and/or know-how needs to translate into commensurate growth in sales or result in higher margins than peers. Although data for the last two years shows a comforting linkage between royalty paid and financial numbers, there are still companies where it is not so and where shareholders need to engage. This and definitional issues suggest that investors still need to remain focussed on royalty. Multi-national corpo

Corporate India is heading towards a future where it will not just be managements and boards, but investors as well who will drive corporate behaviour. The role of institutional investors in Indian corporate governance is evolving. Starting from being providers of capital, their role has extended. Today, as shareholders, they realize that they are more than purveyors of capital and that they, in turn, have a fiduciary responsibility to their investors to engage with their por

This sixth edition of IiAS’ study on timelines of Annual General Meetings (AGMs) of NIFTY 500 companies, confirms our thesis that companies with weak performance wait till the last minute to hold their AGMs. IiAS continues to believe corporate India must be better structured to close its books, publish its annual reports and target its AGM within four months of year-end. Social scientists no longer view procrastination as a time management issue. Procrastinators are seen as b

60 companies can incrementally return almost Rs. 886 billionto shareholders Cash hoarding continues to plague the Indian corporate sector. In our fifth annual study on companies that can pay more, IiAS estimates, based on FY19 financials, that 60 of the S&P BSE 500 companies can, conservatively, return Rs.886 bn of surplus cash to their shareholders; which is just about one-third of their aggregate on-balance-sheet cash on 31 March 2019. Over the years, IiAS has been rallying