Ergo Newsflash

The Indian Government has recently released a press release, approving amendments to the Indian foreign direct investment policy (FDI Policy) in the space sector. While the specific amendments to the FDI Policy and the consequential amendments to the Foreign Exchange Management (Non-Debt Instrument) Rules, 2019 (NDI Rules) are yet to be notified, the proposed amendments aim at liberalizing the sector and providing impetus to its growth in India.

The Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India (IRDAI), with the objective of “transitioning towards principle-based regulations and streamlining the existing array of regulatory stipulations”, has notified the IRDAI (Expenses of Management, including Commission, of Insurers) Regulations 2024 (2024 Unified Regulations) on 24 January 2024, shortly after issuing its exposure draft in November 2023.

Recently, by way of a notification dated 27 October 2023 (Amendment), the Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA) amended the Companies (Prospectus and Allotment of Securities) Rules, 2014 (PAS Rules), inserting a new rule , to require every private company (other than small company and government company) (Private Company) to dematerialise all its securities, issue securities only in dematerialised form and permit transactions in securities only in a dematerialised form. Until now, only public companies were required to do this.

On 31 October 2023, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) issued the circular on ‘Regulation of Payment Aggregator – Cross Border (PA – Cross Border)’ (PA – CB Directions) addressed to all payment system providers and payment system participants. This follows the draft circular on ‘Processing and settlement of small value Export and Import related payments facilitated by ‘Online Export-Import Facilitators (OEIF) (erstwhile OPGSP)’ issued by the RBI on 7 April 2022 (Draft OEIF Directions).

The Import Policy vis-à-vis imports of laptops, tablets, personal computers and other ‘automatic data processing machines’ have been amended and from 1 November 2023, imports of these items will be subjected to mandatory import restrictions, necessitating a valid licence for imports, except in a few specified cases.

India’s 6-year long journey in the realm of data protection and privacy has finally culminated into the latest Digital Personal Data Protection Bill 2023 (2023 Bill). The 2023 Bill was tabled before the lower house of the Parliament (i.e. Lok Sabha) on 3 August 2023, and is now slated to be debated.