The SEBI Compliance Burden: How Boards of Listed Companies Are Navigating the New Normal

The volume of SEBI circulars, amendments, and guidance notes issued in the twelve months to September 2025 has set a new record. CXO India Insights has catalogued 47 significant regulatory developments affecting listed companies in this period — from expanded insider trading disclosure requirements to new mandates on board evaluation processes to revised related-party transaction thresholds. The cumulative compliance burden is substantial, and the companies managing it well are those that have invested in governance infrastructure, not just compliance checklists. The distinction between governance infrastructure and compliance checklists is not semantic. A compliance checklist tells a company what to file and when. Governance infrastructure ensures that the information being filed is accurate, that the processes generating that information are sound, and that the board actually understands what it is signing off on. Companies that invest only in the checklist find themselves filing disclosures that are technically compliant but substantively thin — a posture that creates regulatory and reputational risk as SEBI's enforcement capability and willingness to use it continues to grow. Company secretaries and compliance officers are the unsung heroes of listed-company governance, but they cannot do this work alone. What CXO India observes in well-governed companies is a genuine partnership between the compliance function, the CFO, the legal counsel, and the board's audit committee — with clear accountability for each regulatory domain and a process for escalating ambiguous situations before they become problems. The companies that treat compliance as a legal function rather than a governance function are consistently the ones that attract regulatory attention.