MUMBAI: The larger goal of the market makers should be better inclusion, not just in terms of gender or socioeconomic fronts, but in terms of language inclusion, the Sebi chief Madhabi Puri Buch said.
“It is time market participants communicate with the larger public in their respective languages,” the SEBI chief said.
She stated that economic prosperity will not be complete unless there is better inclusion and participation of a larger number of people in the markets.
“Today, we’re very fortunate that with the help of artificial intelligence, language barriers should be a thing of the past. We need to simplify the English in our regulations. We will need to move past that and say, why do we not have IPO summaries in 15 languages or 27 languages?” she asked addressing a CII event on Monday.
Buch, already under political heat after the US short-seller Hindenburg made a slew of allegations last month, came under fresh attacks earlier in the day in New Delhi with the Congress party making fresh allegations that she drew regular salary to the tune of Rs 16.8 crore between 2014 and 2019 from ICICI Bank group, which was her first employer, while she was a whole time member of the Sebi. After the speech, she refused to meet the media.
“So to pass the inclusion agenda is very large, and it starts from saying in one language, in what medium, through what channel are we being able to communicate everything? A person needs to be able to participate in the economic growth,” she said, adding such inclusion will be an important driver for Sebi going forward.
But she was soon to admit that while looking at inclusion, scalability and cost have to be kept in mind, saying “Unless the cost comes down, inclusion cannot be a reality, because we cannot force the market ecosystem to sell a product that is fundamentally not scalable or not monetisable, which is why we have taken so much trouble to actually make the Rs 250 SIP (launched by Aditya Birla AMC recently) viable.”
She further said “Sebi thinks of capital formation as having two sides of the coin. One is creating the capital for the industry to fuel growth and the second is wealth creation in the hands of the citizens. So it's very important to us, from an inclusion point of view, that the wealth that is going to get created also needs to go into the hands of every citizen.”
