MUMBAI: The new SEBI Chairman, Tuhin Kanta Pandey, who was appointed on Thursday after being pulled out of North Block to head the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), faces a tough challenge ahead. His top priority will be to restore investor confidence—both institutional and retail—amid a market downturn, with indices having lost 18% from their peaks in late September.
Additionally, Pandey will need to restore the sanctity and impartiality of SEBI’s top office, while boosting staff morale, which had been severely affected under his predecessor, Madhavi Puri Buch. Buch’s three-year term, which ends today, was marred by accusations of fostering a ‘toxic work culture’ at SEBI Bhawan.
With finance and revenue secretary Pandey’s appointment, a 1987-batch IAS officer from the Odisha cadre, as the new chairman, the government has reverted to civil servants all the key regulatory positions, after beginning with former revenue secretary Sanjay Malhotra’s appointment as RBI Governor in December. In fact, this restoration began with Shaktikanta Das’ appointment in December 2018 after the RBI’s spat with government came out wide in the open under Raghuram Rajan and Urjit Patel who were academics of international repute.
Barring Puri-Buch, GN Bajpai, SA Dave and SS Nadkarni, all the 13 Sebi chiefs were IAS officials or from the public sector, like the 13th chairman Pandey. His IAS predecessors were Ajay Tyagi (five years), UK Sinha (six years), CB Bhave, M Damodaran, DR Mehta (seven years each), and GV Ramakrishna (four years). While the first chief Dave was from IDBI and so did the third one Nadkarni (only one year) and Bajpai was from the LIC chairman before coming to the Sebi.
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