Ms Nirmala Sitharaman announced the setting up a Social Stock Exchange (SSE) in her budget speech of July 2019 and SEBI was the nodal agency to help set it up. SEBI set up a working group with the mandate of framing the norms for it. Though there are 5 fully functional SSEs and 6 SSE equivalents in the world till date, none of them have been successful. India can learn several lessons from the Global experience and needs a SSE that is Indian in its outlook while at the same time effective in its approach and design. The SEBI report is inadequate and focus is on the investors and their returns. GRAAM has also prepared a detailed roadmap on how a Social Enterprise Ecosystem first needs to be created before a fully functional SSE is set up.
Read my article on ‘Financing NGOs’ that appeared in the Deccan Herald on July 6, 2020.
