On the cards

Rudra Kumar Pandey and Bani Brar forecast emerging regulatory trends and opportunities for in-house counsel to be business leaders.

The International Monetary Fund in its recent report (October 2016) forecasted that India would continue to grow by 7.6% in the financial year 2017. Although the Modi government’s recent demonetization policy has impacted overall private consumption and caused speculation about this growth rate, the government’s commitment to increasing ease of doing business is likely to sustain India’s position as a key market for growth and expansion in 2017.

Some of the major initiatives which will impact businesses in 2017, are the implementation of the goods and services tax; the new Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC); amendments to companies law and arbitration law; the setting up of the National Company Law Tribunal and commercial courts; and the liberalization of foreign direct investment (FDI) in various sectors.

It is expected that mergers & acquisitions (M&A), which hit an all-time high of US$69.75 billion in 2016, will become the favoured route for FDI inflows in 2017, owing in part, to the dominant trend of consolidation in sectors such as e-commerce and telecommunications. The government has also increasingly begun awarding railway, defence and “smart city” projects to Indian and foreign private players, through innovative models of public-private-partnership and new procurement and bidding approaches.

RUDRA KUMAR PANDEY is a partner at Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas & Co, where BANI BRAR is an associate.