The new Chairman of SEBI Ajay Tyagi will have to deal with a number of issues as he begins his three-year tenure on Thursday. This includes issues related to corporate governance, protecting minority shareholders’ interests, integrating commodity spot markets with derivatives and the vexed problem of reigning in malpractices in algo trading.

“He needs to get the needle moving on how to get companies to behave when it comes to implementing their corporate strategy without compromising the interest of its stakeholders, incorporating the learnings from the Tata-Mistry spat and Infosys,” said an analyst with a brokerage firm.

While maintaining diversity and balance on company boards, SEBI would need to ensure that processes such as board appointments and removal, assay of future risk factors for companies, besides evaluation of directors, are done the way it ought to be done, in letter and in spirit.

The new Chairman would need to take steps to take Indian markets abroad by deciding on the manner in which it would be done — one of these being providing the necessary impetus to international financial centres. This, however, cannot be done at the expense of the domestic markets where SEBI would continue to play its role of protecting investors and regulating the markets to ensure fairplay, integrity and trust.

Another area which needs the new chairman’s attention is the way in which he enables better price discovery in commodities, especially agriculture, where SEBI could envisage mechanisms to reflect the prices which would be prevailing when the electronic — national agriculture market, a pan-India electronic portal for spot trading in commodities starts functioning.

In addition other issues involved would be to rope in product,s such as options, besides getting in more participants, such as FPIs.

The final call on how the regulations on algorithmic trading, and co-located servers would shape up would depend on the report of external experts already in the process of looking at the trading data with SEBI. This would be an important milestone in the new chairman’s journey as very few countries have well-defined norms in this area.

The list of issues that Tyagi would have to resolve is long but the manner in which these important issues are tackled would set the tone for future supervision of the securities market in India.