IGIDR Working Paper: Watching India’s insolvency reforms: a new dataset of insolvency cases

“This original paper, published on 31st August, 2017 on this website has been replaced on the realisation that some impertinent phrases were used in the paper. The paper was revised to remove the objectionable phrases, and the authors tender their unconditional apology to the Hon’ble National Company Law Tribunal for using the objectionable phrases.”

NO : WP-2017-012

AUTHOR : Sreyan Chatterjee, Gausia Shaikh and Bhargavi Zaveri

TITLE : Watching India’s insolvency reforms: a new dataset of insolvency cases

ABSTRACT :

In this paper, we introduce a new dataset of orders passed by the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) in the insolvency cases under the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code or IBC. We build this dataset to attempt an empirical analysis of the economic effect of the IBC and the performance of the judiciary under the IBC. There are 23 fields of information recorded in the dataset for each case. We analyse orders passed during the first six months of operationalisation of the provisions of the IBC to answer questions such as who are the initial users of the insolvency process under the IBC, what kind of evidence are they using to support their claims before the NCLT, what is the average time taken by the NCLT to dispose off insolvency cases, what is the outcome of the proceedings and is there variation between the benches. Within this limited dataset and within such a short time from the passing of the law, we find behavioural shifts among credit market participants. As the insolvency cases increase, this data set will too increase in scope and size and will form the foundation to answer questions relating to the impact of the IBC and the overall functioning of the Indian bankruptcy regime.

Keywords : Insolvency reforms; Insolvency research; Creditor rights; Legal data management; Judicial performance; Court reforms

JEL Code : K10; K40; K41; K42; Y10

Weblink : http://www.igidr.ac.in/pdf/publication/WP-2017-012.pdf