Committee to address issues faced by venture capital, private equity

NEW DELHI: The Union finance ministry has set up a high-level committee to address regulatory and other issues to enable scaling up investments by venture capital and private equity investments in the country.

Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman in her Budget 2022-23 speech had announced the setting up of an expert committee to examine and suggest appropriate measures related to venture capital and private equity.

"Venture Capital and Private Equity invested more than Rs 5.5 lakh crore last year facilitating one of the largest start-up and growth ecosystems. Scaling up this investment requires a holistic examination of regulatory and other frictions.

An expert committee will be set up to examine and suggest appropriate measures," Sitharaman had said in her speech. The committee will be headed by former SEBI chairman Meleveetil Damodaran. Under him, there will be five members.

Those members are former whole-time director SEBI G Mahalingam, former member CBIC D P Nagendra Kumar, former Principal Commissioner Income Tax Ashish Verma, DG National Council of Applied Economic Research Poonam Gupta, and Director Arun Jaitley National Institute of Financial Management P R Acharya.

The joint director of the Department of Economic Affairs under the Union finance ministry will coordinate the working of the committee.

As per the terms of reference mentioned in the order, the committee would comprehensively study, using a systems approach, the end-to-end frictions and potential accelerants from regulatory policy and taxation to facilitate ease of investing as well as to encourage investments in India.

It will also review issues, and compliances and suggest simplifications and changes around further accelerating the growth of alternative capital to participate in the industry.

The panel is expected to suggest measures to further accelerate investments into startups and the sunrise sector and recommend forward-looking measures and future-ready regulatory practices, the order said.