India’s anti-trust agency, the Competition Commission of India (CCI), witnessing a void at its top rung which is undermining its capacity to regulate major companies in the world’s fifth-largest economy, reported by news agency Bloomberg.
The CCI, which has imposed million dollar penalties on Alphabet Inc.’s Google to Amazon.com Inc., is functioning with just two members, half the sanctioned strength and one short of quorum. It’s also still missing a chairperson, four months after the previous chairperson retired and seven months since the search for his replacement began.
According to the report, for months, the vacancies stalled approval of mergers and acquisitions until reported reliance on a necessity-led legal concept allowed the process to restart in early February. Enforcement matters that require adjudication remain in limbo.
Avaantika Kakkar, head of competition law practice at Mumbai-based law firm Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas, said, “It’s an unprecedented crisis and a first-time occurrence.”
The competition watchdog has completed more than a thousand combination cases, indicating a growing workload. Among the youngest antitrust regulators in the world, CCI has acted against cement to beer cartels, penalised bid-rigging and gun jumping, and recently fined Google twice.
Even before it lost quorum, the commission suffered from a staff shortage, with at least 30 per cent of positions unfilled through the last decade, according to data collated from annual reports.
The CCI been facing a resource crunch since inception and current vacancies have virtually paralyzed competition regulation in India, said Pradeep Mehta, secretary general at advocacy group CUTS Institute for Regulation & Competition.
In 2018, faced with rising vacancies at the top, the government “rightsized” the commission from seven to four members in the interest of “minimum government — maximum governance,” it said. The change may have streamlined decision-making but robbed orders of diversity in opinion, Kakkar said. Managing quorum became tougher too.
Most members are retired bureaucrats, which results in leaders “who are not familiar with regulation but very comfortable with control,” Mehta said.
Over the years, deputation from other government departments has decreased, but even now comprises the full staff in the Director General’s office charged with investigating anticompetitive practices.