FSDC

India's securities market has more than one regulator. SEBI, the RBI, the Department of Economic Affairs and the Ministry of Corporate Affairs each hold a piece of the job.

Before 2010, these bodies coordinated through an informal committee. The FSDC replaced that committee. It gave the coordination a formal footing.

In 2010, the Financial Stability and Development Council (FSDC) replaced the High Level Coordination Committee on Financial Markets (HLCCFM), which had earlier facilitated regulatory coordination among India's financial regulators, but only informally. The HLCCFM's secretariat sat within the Capital Market Division of the Department of Economic Affairs, Ministry of Finance.

The regulatory responsibility FSDC coordinates is shared across several bodies: SEBI, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), the Department of Economic Affairs (DEA) of the Ministry of Finance, and the Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA) — each with its own statutory powers, but with systemic financial stability questions cutting across all of them.

Consider a hypothetical stress event where a large NBFC's default threatens to spill over into mutual fund debt schemes, banking sector liquidity and corporate bond market confidence all at once — a scenario that touches SEBI's regulation of mutual funds, RBI's regulation of the NBFC and the banking system, and the DEA's broader capital market policy responsibility simultaneously.

Before 2010, resolving such a cross-cutting issue would have run through the informal HLCCFM. Since 2010, it is the FSDC — the body specifically set up to give this kind of inter-regulatory coordination a formal footing — through which such systemic concerns are meant to be coordinated across SEBI, RBI, the DEA and the MCA.

Chapter 1, section 1.4 (Regulators), in the discussion of how securities market regulatory responsibility is shared across SEBI, RBI, the DEA and the MCA. Expect FSDC tested on the year it was set up (2010), what it replaced (the informal HLCCFM), and where that predecessor's secretariat sat (the Capital Market Division, DEA, Ministry of Finance).

• FSDC formalised coordination that already existed informally through the HLCCFM — it is not the first body to coordinate these regulators, it is the first formal one.
• 2010 is the FSDC's founding year — a commonly tested recall figure.
• FSDC coordinates; it does not replace the individual statutory powers of SEBI, RBI, the DEA or the MCA — each retains its own regulatory authority under its own governing Act.
• Do not confuse FSDC with the Securities Appellate Tribunal, which hears appeals against SEBI orders — the two sit in entirely different parts of the regulatory structure described in the same chapter section.