The Competition Commission of India is the institution through which Indian competition law either happens or does not happen. The statute it administers prohibits defined conduct: agreements that cause an appreciable adverse effect on competition, abuse of a dominant position, and combinations that cross notified thresholds without clearance. Those prohibitions are examined in the article on the Competition Act 2002 explained, which owns the substantive law. This article owns the institution: the seven chairs at its top, the investigative office beneath them, the procedural path a case travels from a piece of information to a final order, the appellate corridor beyond the order, and the record that results when all of that machinery has run for a decade and a half. Its central fact is one that public discussion persistently blurs. The Commission’s penalty orders are the most visible output of Indian competition enforcement, and they are routinely reported as though they were the outcome of enforcement. They are its midpoint. A large proportion of the penalties announced have been appealed, stayed, reduced or set aside, and the amount recovered is a small fraction of the amount imposed, so the institution’s real constraint lies in the appellate and recovery stages of its own process rather than in its ability to investigate and decide.

That distinction organises everything that follows. An institution profile of the Commission has to answer four questions in sequence. How is the body composed, and who chooses the people who sit on it? How does a matter move, step by step, from information received to an order that binds? Where does the order go next, and who controls what happens to it there? And what, counted with discipline, has actually been achieved by the time the whole path has been walked? The answers reveal a regulator that was designed twice, staffed intermittently, and given its coercive powers in instalments, and whose history explains its record better than any judgment about its competence does.

Established in 2003, armed in 2009

The Commission’s biography begins with a gap of nearly six years between its legal existence and its working life. The Competition Act received assent in January 2003 and was published as Act 12 of 2003 despite its 2002 title. Its commencement was left to notification, section by section, and the institutional provisions came first: a first group of sections was brought into force on 31 March 2003 and the establishment provision followed on 19 June 2003. The Competition Commission of India was established on 14 October 2003. The operative prohibitions, sections 3 and 4 on agreements and abuse of dominance, were not notified at all. A regulator existed on paper, with a seal, a headquarters in New Delhi and a statutory duty to eliminate practices having an adverse effect on competition, and it had no prohibition it could enforce.

The delay was not administrative drift. It was litigation. The original design of the Commission concentrated functions in a way that invited a constitutional challenge, and the challenge came at once. The Commission as enacted in 2002 was to be both regulator and adjudicator: it would inquire, investigate through its Director General, and then itself pass orders, including orders imposing penalties, and its Chairperson was to be chosen from persons of ability, integrity and standing with professional experience in fields such as economics, commerce, law and public affairs. No judicial member was required. In Brahm Dutt v. Union of India, decided by the Supreme Court in 2005 and reported at (2005) 2 SCC 431, a petitioner argued that a body exercising adjudicatory functions of this character had to be headed by a judicial person and structured on the model of a tribunal. The Court did not strike the Act down. In the course of the hearing the Union of India stated that it proposed to amend the Act so that the Commission would function as a regulatory and expert body and a separate appellate tribunal, chaired by a judicial appointee, would hear appeals from its orders. The writ petition was disposed of on the strength of that statement, and the design question was settled politically rather than judicially.

When was the Competition Commission of India established, and when did it begin enforcing the Act?

The Commission was established on 14 October 2003 under the Competition Act, 2002, after the establishment provision was brought into force in June 2003. It began enforcing the substantive prohibitions only on 20 May 2009, when sections 3 and 4 were notified, and it acquired merger control on 1 June 2011, when the combination provisions commenced.

The promised amendment arrived as the Competition (Amendment) Act, 2007, in force from October 2007. It recast the composition provisions, rewrote the selection machinery, and created the Competition Appellate Tribunal, a dedicated appellate body whose chairperson was to be a person who had been a judge of the Supreme Court or the Chief Justice of a High Court. The Commission kept its adjudicatory powers at first instance, which the 2007 settlement did not remove; what changed was the architecture around it, with a judicially headed appeal standing between the Commission’s order and the Supreme Court, and with the appointment process for the Commission itself placed under a selection committee chaired by the Chief Justice of India or a nominee. The founding controversy therefore left permanent marks on the institution. The Commission’s composition, examined below, cannot be understood without it, because the selection committee exists precisely to answer the objection that an adjudicating regulator must not be a body of the executive’s unfiltered choosing.

Only after the recast was complete did the enforcement provisions move. Sections 3 and 4 came into force on 20 May 2009, and on the same day the appellate tribunal began its work, so that the first orders the Commission passed were appealable to a functioning forum. Dhanendra Kumar became the Commission’s first Chairperson in its working incarnation in May 2009. The repeal of the Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices Act followed on 1 September 2009, closing the predecessor regime. The combination provisions, sections 5 and 6, commenced last, on 1 June 2011, adding merger control to a conduct docket that had been running for two years. The institution’s biography is therefore a sequence of instalments: establishment in 2003, redesign in 2007, conduct powers in 2009, merger powers in 2011, and, as later sections record, an appellate merger in 2017 and an institutional amendment in 2023. Each instalment arrived after the previous one had settled, which is one reason the Commission’s decisional practice is younger than its date of establishment suggests. Measured from its first enforceable prohibition, the Commission had been deciding cases for barely a decade when its largest penalties were being announced.

The staged commencement also shaped the institution’s internal balance. Because conduct enforcement began two years before merger control, the Commission’s early identity was investigative and adjudicatory, built around cartels and dominance. Merger review, when it arrived, brought a different temperament: statutory clocks, a presumption in favour of clearance, and a filing community of transactional lawyers rather than informants and respondents. The two dockets run side by side inside one small body, and the difference between them matters for understanding where the Commission’s record is strong and where it is thin.

Who sits on the Competition Commission of India

Section 8 of the Act, as substituted by the amendment of 2007, fixes the composition. The Commission consists of a Chairperson and not less than two and not more than six other Members, appointed by the Central Government. The Chairperson and every Member must be a person of ability, integrity and standing who has special knowledge of, and professional experience of not less than fifteen years in, one or more of a listed set of fields: international trade, economics, business, commerce, law, finance, accountancy, management, industry, public affairs or competition matters, including competition law and policy. The Chairperson and Members are whole-time office holders. Three features of this design deserve attention, because each carries an institutional consequence.

The first is breadth of discipline. The qualifying fields span the professions that a competition authority needs, and the Commission’s benches have in practice mixed former civil servants, economists, lawyers and chartered accountants. The design rejects the model of a court in miniature: no member need be a judge, and the presence of economists on the bench is structural rather than decorative, because the questions the Act asks, about market definition, effects on competition and dominance, are economic questions with legal consequences. The second feature is the fifteen year threshold, which makes the Commission a body of senior appointees at the end of long careers elsewhere. That choice buys experience at the price of short horizons: members arrive with reputations formed in other services and, as the tenure provisions show, they do not stay long. The third feature is the band of two to six members. The statute permits seven people at the top of the institution; it has rarely had them, and the consequences of that gap occupy a later section of this article.

Appointment is governed by section 9. The Chairperson and Members are appointed by the Central Government from a panel of names recommended by a Selection Committee. The committee consists of the Chief Justice of India or the Chief Justice’s nominee, who chairs it; the Secretary in the Ministry of Corporate Affairs; the Secretary in the Ministry of Law and Justice; and two experts of repute with special knowledge and professional experience in the same listed fields. The presence of the Chief Justice or a nominee at the head of the committee is the direct descendant of the Brahm Dutt settlement: the judiciary does not appoint the Commission, but the executive cannot appoint it without passing through a room in which a judicial voice presides and two independent experts sit. Tenure is set by section 10. The Chairperson and every Member hold office for a term of five years from the date of entering office, are eligible for reappointment, and may not hold office after attaining the age of sixty five years. Salary and service conditions are prescribed by rules, and the Act protects them against disadvantageous variation after appointment.

A second, quieter decision about size came from the executive rather than Parliament. In 2018 the Union Cabinet, in a general exercise of reducing the size of tribunals and commissions, decided that the Commission would function with a Chairperson and three Members rather than the statutory maximum of six Members. The statutory band in section 8 was not amended; the working strength was simply held at four. That decision interacts dangerously with the Act’s quorum rule, and it is the background against which the quorum episode of 2022 and 2023, described below, has to be read. A body designed for seven, run at four, and required to muster three members for a valid meeting has no slack for a retirement, a vacancy or a delayed appointment. The Commission’s strength has in practice oscillated between that working figure and something smaller, and every oscillation has fallen hardest on the merger docket, where statutory clocks do not stop for vacancies.

The succession of chairpersons tells the same story of instalments. Dhanendra Kumar led the working Commission from 2009. Later chairpersons included Ashok Chanda and Devender Kumar Sikri, and Ashok Kumar Gupta held the office until 25 October 2022, when his term expired. The vacancy that followed lasted about seven months, with Sangeeta Verma, a Member since December 2018, serving as Acting Chairperson, until Ravneet Kaur, an officer of the Indian Administrative Service, assumed charge as Chairperson on 23 May 2023, the first woman to hold the post. The appointment was expressed to run for five years from the date of assuming charge or until the age of sixty five, whichever came earlier, which is the section 10 pattern stated in the appointment order itself.

What qualifications must a member of the Competition Commission have?

A member must be a person of ability, integrity and standing with special knowledge and at least fifteen years of professional experience in a field listed in section 8, such as economics, law, finance, commerce, management or competition matters, and the appointment is made by the Central Government from a panel recommended by the selection committee under section 9.

Independence, and the protections around the office

A regulator that fines the largest companies in the country, and can fine public sector undertakings and government departments carrying on commercial activity as well, needs tenure protections that make retaliation difficult. The Act builds them in layers. Removal is governed by section 11. The Central Government may remove a Chairperson or Member on specified grounds, which include insolvency, conviction for an offence involving moral turpitude in the Government’s opinion, engagement in paid employment outside the office, physical or mental incapacity, acquisition of a financial or other interest likely to affect the functions prejudicially, and abuse of position rendering continuance prejudicial to the public interest. For the graver and more judgment-laden grounds, the Act interposes the Supreme Court: removal on the ground of abuse of position or prejudicial interest follows only after the Supreme Court, on a reference made to it, has reported after an inquiry that the office holder ought to be removed. Resignation is by writing to the Central Government, and the office holder continues until a successor enters office, removal, or the expiry of three months from the notice, whichever is earliest, unless permitted to relinquish sooner.

Section 12 addresses the revolving door. As amended by the amendment of 2023, the Chairperson and Members are barred, for two years after ceasing to hold office, from accepting employment with, or appearing and pleading before the Commission on behalf of, an enterprise that had been a party before the Commission during their tenure, subject to exceptions for government service and bodies wholly or substantially owned or controlled by government. The direction of the provision is worth noting: the disability attaches to the enterprises the office holder actually dealt with, which is where the temptation to trade on inside knowledge and goodwill is real. The Commission’s staff are its own: under section 17 the Commission appoints its officers and employees, including the Director General’s establishment, and its expenses are met from grants made by the Central Government under section 50, with accounts audited and an annual report laid before Parliament. Financial dependence on annual grants is the soft underbelly of the formal independence, and commentators have noted across the tribunal system that a body whose budget, staff rules and appointments all route through the executive it regulates against enjoys independence of a qualified kind. The Commission’s defenders answer that the same is true of most Indian regulators and that its decisional record, which includes orders against powerful state-owned enterprises, does not read as the record of a captured body. Both points stand, and the honest summary is that the Act gives the Commission strong tenure protection for its members and weak structural protection for the institution, a combination whose effects show up less in individual decisions than in the vacancies and quorum failures described later.

One further structural feature deserves a place here because profile accounts usually omit it. The Commission is a single body that investigates nothing itself: investigation is delegated by statute to the Director General, a separation built into the Act from the start and carried over from the design of the predecessor regime. The Commission directs, receives, hears and decides; the Director General inquires and reports. That internal separation of prosecutor and judge within one statutory family is the institution’s answer to the fair-trial objection that destroyed the original 2002 design, and it shapes every procedural step described in the next two sections.

The Director General: the investigative arm

Section 16 creates the office of Director General, appointed to assist the Commission in conducting inquiry into contravention of the Act and to perform such other functions as the Act provides. For the first two decades the Director General was appointed by the Central Government by notification. The amendment of 2023 transferred the appointment to the Commission itself, acting with the prior approval of the Central Government, a change traced in the article on the Competition (Amendment) Act 2023 and worth pausing on here because it alters the institution’s internal politics. An investigator appointed by the government that also appoints the adjudicators sits at one remove from both; an investigator appointed by the adjudicators, with a governmental veto, sits within the institution’s own chain of responsibility. Supporters of the change present it as completing the Commission’s institutional autonomy, since the Commission owns the performance of the office whose reports it must judge. Critics note that the separation between the investigating office and the deciding body was the design’s fair-trial safeguard, and that moving the appointment inside the Commission thins the visible distance between the two. The prior approval requirement keeps the executive’s hand on the door either way.

The Director General’s powers are in section 41. When directed by the Commission to investigate, the Director General may call upon officers and employees of the office for assistance, and the office is equipped with the powers of a civil court for the investigative task: summoning and enforcing the attendance of persons and examining them on oath, requiring the discovery and production of documents, receiving evidence on affidavit, and issuing commissions for the examination of witnesses and documents. The amendment of 2023 recast these powers so that they stand in the Competition Act itself, including powers of search and seizure exercised under judicial authorisation from the Chief Metropolitan Magistrate at Delhi, rather than being borrowed through the inspector provisions of company law as the original text had arranged. Search and seizure, the dawn raid of enforcement vocabulary, matters because cartel evidence is documentary and perishable: price circulars, bid rotation notes and messaging records do not survive a polite request for production. The Director General may also summon information in combination matters and, under the lesser penalty regime in section 46, receives and processes applications from cartel members seeking a reduction of penalty in exchange for disclosure, under regulations that protect the applicant’s identity at the investigative stage.

Three institutional observations follow. First, the Director General recommends and never decides. The report that closes an investigation is placed before the Commission, which is free to disagree with it in either direction, and the courts have treated the report as material to be weighed rather than a verdict to be reviewed. Secondly, the office’s capacity is the system’s true bottleneck. A cartel investigation requires economists, forensic document work and the patience to build a record that will survive appeal years later, and the Director General’s office works with a staff far smaller than the enforcement directorates of the mature authorities abroad. The Competition Law Review Committee, chaired by Injeti Srinivas and reporting in 2019, recorded capacity and specialisation concerns of exactly this kind and recommended institutional strengthening of the investigative function. Thirdly, the investigative stage is where cases are effectively won and lost, because the Commission’s hearing is conducted on the record the investigation builds. Respondents therefore litigate the investigation stage intensely, through writ petitions against summonses and directions, even though, as the next section explains, the direction that starts the investigation is not itself appealable.

How a case moves from information to order

Section 19 gives the Commission three doors into an inquiry. It may act on its own motion. It may act on information received from any person, consumer or a consumer or trade association, and the information route is deliberately open: the informant need not be a victim, a competitor or even an Indian resident, and the Act’s regulations prescribe a modest filing fee graded to the informant. It may act on a reference from the Central Government, a State Government or a statutory authority. This article describes the institution and its procedure as a matter of general legal information; it is not advice on any live matter. Once seized of a matter, the Commission’s first task is screening: it considers whether a prima facie case of contravention exists. If none exists, section 26(2) lets it close the matter at the threshold, and the informant may appeal that closure to the appellate tribunal, so even the decision not to act is a reviewable order. If a prima facie case exists, section 26(1) directs the Director General to investigate. The Commission also has a power under section 26(9), added by the amendment of 2023, to close a case even after an investigation report finds contravention, after hearing the parties and issuing a show cause notice, a safety valve against being locked into its own first impression.

The direction under section 26(1) is the most litigated non-event in Indian competition law. In Competition Commission of India v. Steel Authority of India Limited, decided in 2010 and reported at (2010) 10 SCC 744, the Supreme Court held that the direction is administrative in character: it records an opinion that a prima facie case exists, decides nothing about the respondent’s rights, and is not among the orders appealable under section 53A. The first appealable moment is the final order. The holding determines the procedural shape of every case. A respondent cannot appeal the decision to investigate it; its protections are the hearing before the final order, the requirement that findings be reasoned, and the appeal that then lies. The Supreme Court in the same judgment pressed the Commission on expedition and on the discipline of its own timelines, and the proposition that the investigation direction is administrative has been reaffirmed since, including in the Bharti Airtel litigation described later. Parties still file writ petitions against investigation directions in the High Courts, and those petitions, though they rarely succeed in stopping an investigation, consume the years that critics of the system then count against the Commission’s speed.

On receiving the direction, the Director General investigates and submits a report with findings and the evidence gathered. The Commission forwards the report to the parties, receives their objections and suggestions, and may order further investigation. If the Director General recommends that no contravention is made out, the Commission must hear the informant and the governments concerned before closing, and may close under section 26(6) or order a further inquiry under section 26(7); closure on a no-contravention report is itself appealable by the informant. If the report finds contravention, or the Commission’s own view differs, the matter proceeds to a hearing at which the parties appear in person or through authorised representatives, and the Commission may take evidence, including expert evidence, on the record. Section 36 equips the Commission with the powers of a civil court for summoning witnesses and documents, while directing it to be guided by the principles of natural justice and to regulate its own procedure. Pending the inquiry, section 33 empowers the Commission, on being satisfied that an act in contravention has been committed, continues to be committed or is about to be committed, to restrain a party temporarily until the inquiry concludes, a power used sparingly because it intervenes before findings are final.

Confidentiality runs through the procedure as a practical necessity. Informants and leniency applicants will not hand over cartel documents if their identity and material will be circulated to the very respondents named in them, so the Commission’s general regulations provide for confidential treatment of material on request, with inspection regimes that let respondents test the evidence without taking possession of a rival’s secrets. The same problem appears outside the courtroom for the journalists and researchers who document enforcement from the public side of the file, and the discipline of keeping sensitive source material intact, access-controlled and out of circulation is described for that profession in the VaultBook account of how journalists protect sources and their documents. The institution’s promise to informants stands or falls on this plumbing: a single leak would dry up the information channel on which the conduct docket depends.

The table below compresses the path into its steps, with the actor at each step, the period the law prescribes where it prescribes one, and the way matters leave the path. The final column is where the institution’s record, examined in a later section, is actually made.

Step	Who acts	What happens	Period prescribed	How matters leave the path
Information, reference or own motion	Any person, a government or a statutory authority, or the Commission itself	The matter enters the registry and is placed before the Commission	Information must relate to conduct within three years of its commission, unless the Commission condones the delay for sufficient cause, under the amendment of 2023	Many informations are closed at screening for disclosing no contravention
Prima facie consideration	The Commission	The Commission forms an opinion whether a prima facie case exists and either closes the matter under section 26(2) or directs investigation under section 26(1)	No fixed period; the closure order is appealable by the informant	Closure ends the matter unless the informant appeals and the tribunal remands
Investigation	The Director General	Summonses, documents on oath, search and seizure under judicial authorisation, and a report with findings	No statutory outer limit for conduct inquiries; combination inquiries run on the statutory clocks described in the text	The report may find no contravention, sending the matter to the closure route of sections 26(6) and 26(7)
Objections and hearing	The Commission, with the parties	The report is supplied to the parties, objections are received, further investigation may be ordered, and a hearing is held	Governed by the Commission’s regulations and natural justice	A settlement or commitment, under the provisions inserted in 2023, can end the matter here on agreed terms
Final order	The Commission	Directions to discontinue the conduct, penalty, modification of agreements, and other orders under section 27	None prescribed	The order is the midpoint of the process, not its end
Appeal	The National Company Law Appellate Tribunal	Appeal on the merits, with a deposit of twenty five per cent of the penalty required after the amendment of 2023 before the appeal is entertained	Sixty days from communication of the order, with power to condone delay	Of the Commission’s orders passed between 2009 and 2021, about a third were appealed, on the count made during the amendment debates
Further appeal	The Supreme Court	Appeal on a question of law	Sixty days from the tribunal’s order	A small number of matters travel this far
Recovery	The Commission, through the modes in section 39	The penalty is recovered as an arrear through the prescribed modes, on the expiry of the demand notice period if the penalty is not paid	The demand under the recovery regulations is ordinarily stayed while an appeal with a deposit is pending	Recovery is a small fraction of imposition: figures cited by the Ministry of Corporate Affairs in support of the deposit provision put aggregate penalties near twenty thousand crore rupees and recovery near one per cent

The orders at the end of the path

When an inquiry ends in a finding of contravention, section 27 arms the Commission with a menu of orders. It may direct the parties to discontinue the agreement or the abuse and not to re-enter it. It may impose a penalty, computed by reference to turnover under the formula the Act prescribes, a computation whose interpretive history is owned by the amendment trail rather than by this profile. It may direct that the agreement be modified as the order specifies. It may pass such other order or issue such directions as it considers fit. Section 28 adds the most drastic remedy on the menu: where a dominant enterprise’s conduct requires it, the Commission may recommend, and the Central Government may direct, the division of the enterprise so that it does not abuse its dominant position. The division power has never been carried through against an enterprise in a decided case, and its presence on the menu functions more as a statement of the regime’s outer boundary than as a working tool. For combinations, section 31 supplies the parallel menu: approval, approval with modifications, or a direction that the combination shall not take effect, within an outer statutory period after which the combination is deemed approved, a period the amendment of 2023 shortened from two hundred and ten days to one hundred and fifty. Section 53N opens a second front after the order: persons who have suffered loss from a contravention found by the Commission may apply to the appellate tribunal for compensation, so a final order is also the foundation document for private claims, another reason respondents contest findings with such tenacity.

The order-writing itself has become an institutional discipline. Early Commission orders were criticised by the appellate tribunal for thin reasoning on market definition and effects, and some were set aside on that account; the Commission’s later practice, longer orders with a structured treatment of the relevant market, the conduct and the section 19 factors, is in part a response written under appellate pressure. This is the sense in which the appellate corridor is not external to the institution but part of its training mechanism, a point that returns in the assessment at the end of this article.

The appellate corridor: from a dedicated tribunal to a generalist one

The appeal from the Commission’s final order was designed, in the settlement of 2007, to lie to a specialist. The Competition Appellate Tribunal began functioning in 2009 alongside the enforcement provisions, chaired by a judicial appointee and staffed with members chosen for their knowledge of competition law, economics and allied fields. For eight years it did the work the design intended: it heard appeals against orders under sections 26(2), 26(6), 27, 28, 31, 33 and the penalty and compensation provisions, it could confirm, modify or set aside the order appealed against, and it built the first body of appellate doctrine in Indian competition law, including the natural justice corrections that sent the first cement cartel order back for a rehearing. Section 53B fixes the appeal period at sixty days from the communication of the order, with a power to condone delay for sufficient cause, and the amendment of 2023 added a condition with real teeth: an appeal against an order imposing a penalty is not to be entertained unless the appellant deposits twenty five per cent of the penalty amount, a pre-deposit directed precisely at the recovery gap examined later in this article. From the tribunal, section 53T carries a further appeal to the Supreme Court within sixty days, on a question of law.

Which tribunal heard competition appeals before the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal?

The Competition Appellate Tribunal, created by the amendment of 2007 as a dedicated appellate body with a judicial chairperson, heard appeals from the Commission from 2009 until 26 May 2017, when the Finance Act, 2017 merged it into the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal and competition appeals moved to the company law appellate forum.

The merger of 2017 was one move in a larger consolidation of tribunals carried out through Part XIV of the Finance Act, 2017. The Competition Appellate Tribunal ceased to exist on 26 May 2017, and its jurisdiction passed to the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal, the appellate body constituted under the Companies Act, 2013 whose constitution and other work are described in the article on the National Company Law Tribunal and the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal. The receiving tribunal’s principal business is company law and, since December 2016, insolvency appeals under the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, a docket that has grown to dominate its lists. Competition appeals therefore arrive in a forum whose members are selected primarily for company and insolvency work, whose benches sit under severe caseload pressure from another statute, and whose specialisation in competition economics is incidental rather than designed.

The parallel with the intellectual property cluster is direct, and the brief for this article requires it to be drawn. The Intellectual Property Appellate Board, the specialist forum for trade mark and patent appeals, was abolished in 2021 and its work sent to the High Courts, an episode traced in the guide to intellectual property law in India: in both fields the Indian state first built a specialist appellate forum because the subject demanded one, then dissolved it into a generalist forum in the name of consolidation, and then discovered that the generalist forum’s other priorities set the pace for the specialist subject. The defenders of the 2017 merger answer that the appellate tribunal’s competition disposals did not collapse after the merger and that a single appellate tribunal economises on judicial leadership, which is genuinely scarce. The critics answer that disposal counts measure throughput, not depth, and that competition appeals raise economic questions of a kind that a bench assembled for insolvency may handle conscientiously without ever developing the field’s doctrine. The evidence supports a verdict narrower than either side’s rhetoric: the merger did not break the appellate corridor, but it removed the one forum whose institutional self-understanding was competition law, and the corridor has run more slowly and less predictably since, for reasons that include the insolvency docket’s statutory urgency crowding out competition lists.

Within that corridor, the deposit requirement of 2023 has its own controversy, and it should be stated from both sides. The Government’s case, advanced in support of the provision, was arithmetical: aggregate penalties imposed since the Commission began work stood near twenty thousand crore rupees, recovery stood near one per cent, and appeals functioned in practice as an inexpensive stay on payment. A firm commenting on the proposal from the appellants’ side, RegStreet Law Advisors, answered with the tribunal’s own disposal record: of 556 appeals disposed of between 2009 and 2021, 219, about forty per cent, had been allowed, and of 1,030 orders passed by the Commission in the same period only 333 had been appealed at all, which is to say that about sixty eight per cent of orders were accepted without an appeal. On those figures, the commentary argued, appeals are not a frivolous refuge but a working error-correction mechanism that succeeds two times in five, and taxing entry to it at a quarter of the penalty burdens the correction along with the delay. The figures on both sides are the same record read for different morals, and they are set out with their companions in the record section below.

The quorum episode: when the institution could not constitute itself

Between 25 October 2022 and 23 May 2023 the Commission passed through the strangest passage in its history: it could not lawfully assemble the body that the Act requires to decide. Section 22 governs the Commission’s meetings and the Act fixes a quorum of three Members for the transaction of business. When Ashok Kumar Gupta demitted office as Chairperson on 25 October 2022 at the end of his term, the Commission was left with two Members, Sangeeta Verma, who was appointed Acting Chairperson, and Bhagwant Singh Bishnoi. Two is less than three. The conduct docket could pause without legal catastrophe, but the merger docket could not: combinations notified under sections 5 and 6 are deemed approved if the Commission does not decide within the outer statutory period, and a deemed approval produced by the regulator’s own inability to meet would have cleared transactions by default that the statute required it to examine. Contemporary reporting counted fifteen notified combinations pending in January 2023, and Avaantika Kakkar, the competition practice head at Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas, wrote to the Ministry of Corporate Affairs on 11 January 2023 setting out the prejudice to acquirers, lenders, shareholders and employees from clearances the Commission was unable to give.

The Commission’s resolution was to continue acting, and it rested on two supports. The first was section 15, the Act’s saving provision, under which no act or proceeding of the Commission is invalid merely by reason of a vacancy in, or a defect in the constitution of, the Commission. The second was the doctrine of necessity, the principle that a body charged with a mandatory public function must discharge it when the alternative is the function’s collapse, on which the Commission acted after taking the opinion of the Attorney General, as reporting of the period records. On that footing the two-member Commission cleared combinations, six of them on a single day in February 2023. The episode ended when Ravneet Kaur assumed charge as Chairperson on 23 May 2023, restoring the quorum about seven months after it was lost. It then recurred in milder form within the year: Bhagwant Singh Bishnoi superannuated in August 2023 and Sangeeta Verma demitted office the following month, leaving the Chairperson briefly without any Member until fresh appointments were made.

The episode should be assessed without imputation, because both readings of it are honestly available. The defence is that the Commission faced a genuine dilemma created by others: appointments are the executive’s function, the vacancies were the executive’s delay, and the choice was between acting under the saving provision and the doctrine of necessity or letting notified transactions receive deemed approvals the statute never intended as a vacancy windfall. The criticism is that section 15 saves proceedings from invalidity on account of a vacancy, which is not obviously the same thing as authorising a body to transact business below the quorum the Act prescribes, and that approvals granted in the interval carry a latent challenge risk that transactional parties did not create and cannot remove. The deeper point is structural and connects back to the composition section: a working strength of four, fixed by an executive decision in 2018 against a statutory ceiling of seven, converted an ordinary succession gap into a constitutional embarrassment. Institutions that depend on a quorum should not be staffed at one retirement above it.

Why the vacancies keep happening

The quorum episode was an acute form of a chronic condition, and its causes are worth isolating because they predict recurrence. Appointments to the Commission require the selection committee to be convened, a panel to be recommended, and the Government to choose and notify, and every stage sits inside the executive’s calendar rather than the institution’s. Terms expire on dates known years in advance, yet the succession process in the Indian tribunal system habitually begins near or after the vacancy it is meant to prevent, because no statute imposes a timeline on the committee or a duty to have a successor ready. The age ceiling of sixty five and the five year term interact to shorten effective tenures for appointees drawn from the senior civil services, who often arrive with only part of a term available before the ceiling reaches them, multiplying the frequency of succession events. The 2018 decision to work at four members then removes the buffer that the statutory ceiling of seven was designed to provide. The result is an institution whose legal capacity to sit oscillates with administrative delay in another building, a dependence no drafting of its decisional provisions can cure. The remedy most often proposed by commentators on the tribunal system generally, a standing appointments calendar with succession initiated a fixed period before a known vacancy, requires no amendment to the Competition Act at all, which is perhaps the sharpest criticism available of the present arrangement: the failure is not legal but administrative, and it recurs because nothing in the system makes anyone answerable for it. Until that changes, the quorum episode of 2022 and 2023 should be read not as an accident in the Commission’s biography but as a scheduled event whose date merely had not been announced.

Sharing the field: sector regulators and the State as enterprise

The Commission does not hold the Indian market to itself. Sector regulators govern telecommunications, securities, insurance, banking and electricity, and the Act builds traffic rules for the overlap in sections 21 and 21A: a statutory authority seized of an issue that may contravene the Competition Act may refer it to the Commission for an opinion, and the Commission seized of an issue within a statutory authority’s competence may refer it in the other direction, each side deciding for itself after receiving the other’s view within sixty days. The hard case is simultaneous engagement, and it reached the Supreme Court in Competition Commission of India v. Bharti Airtel Limited, decided on 5 December 2018. The Commission had ordered an investigation into allegations that the incumbent mobile operators and their association had coordinated to deny points of interconnection to a new entrant. The operators answered that interconnection was the telecom regulator’s technical province. The Supreme Court did not oust the Commission’s jurisdiction, which it expressly preserved; it held that the sector regulator must first determine the technical and jurisdictional facts committed to its expertise, after which the Commission’s inquiry could proceed on the facts as determined. Sequence, not exclusion, is the rule the case lays down, and it remains the working settlement between the Commission and the sector regulators: the specialist regulator has the first word on its own technical questions and the Commission has the last word on competition.

What did the Supreme Court decide in the Bharti Airtel case about the Commission and the telecom regulator?

The Supreme Court held in December 2018 that the Commission’s jurisdiction over the telecom operators was not displaced by the telecom regulator’s statute, but that the regulator had first to determine the technical questions within its own province, on which the allegation depended, and the Commission’s investigation would proceed thereafter on the facts so found.

The second boundary is with the State itself. Section 2(h) counts a department of government as an enterprise when it carries on activities of an economic kind, excluding sovereign functions such as atomic energy, currency, defence and space. When the Commission proceeded against Coal India Limited, the nationalised coal producer, the challenge was raised that a statutory monopoly stood outside competition law. The Supreme Court’s judgment of 2023 in Coal India Limited v. Competition Commission of India rejected the immunity: an enterprise carrying on commercial activity is subject to the Act whatever the source of its charter, and the proceedings against Coal India went forward on that footing. The proposition matters institutionally because it fixes the Commission’s jurisdiction by function rather than by ownership, and it has been applied across public sector undertakings in sectors from railways-linked services to public procurement.

Does competition law reach a State monopoly such as Coal India?

It does. The Supreme Court held in 2023 that Coal India Limited, though a statutory monopoly and a government company, is an enterprise within the Act when it carries on commercial activity, so the Commission may inquire into its conduct; the Act’s exclusion covers sovereign functions, not state trading.

The enforcement record, counted properly

The Commission’s record invites the same counting discipline this series has applied to the anti-terror law enforcement record: a headline figure measures a decision, not an outcome, and the two are routinely quoted as though they were the same. Three numbers must be kept apart. The first is imposition: the aggregate of penalties the Commission has announced. The second is survival: the share of orders and penalty amounts that emerge from the appellate corridor intact. The third is recovery: the money actually collected. Public discussion quotes the first number and implies the third, and the gap between them is the single most informative statistic about the institution.

On imposition, the figures cited by the Ministry of Corporate Affairs in support of the deposit provision in the amendment of 2023, and reported in The Hindu BusinessLine in January of that year, put the aggregate penalty imposed since the Commission began enforcing at nearly twenty thousand crore rupees, with recovery at about one per cent of that sum. On survival, the disposal analysis published by RegStreet Law Advisors during the same debate counted 556 appeals disposed of by the appellate tribunal between 2009 and 2021, of which 219 were allowed, a success rate for appellants of about forty per cent, against 1,030 orders passed by the Commission in the period, of which 333 had been appealed. Read together, the figures describe a corridor in which roughly a third of orders are appealed, two in five of those appeals succeed in whole or part, and the penalty pipeline narrows at every stage before the recovery stage narrows it almost to nothing. Any single figure drawn from this record without its stage attached, including the figures in this paragraph, misdescribes the institution.

The named orders behind the aggregates show the same pattern at case level. The cement cartel proceedings produced a penalty of Rs 6,317 crore in the Commission’s first order of 2012; the appellate tribunal set that order aside in December 2015 because the member who had heard the parties was not the member who signed, the Commission reheard the matter and imposed penalties of a similar scale in 2016, and the appellate tribunal upheld the second round in 2018. The penalty of Rs 630 crore imposed on DLF Limited in 2011, among the earliest large abuse penalties, was substantially sustained on appeal with modifications to the accompanying directions. The tyre cartel order imposed penalties totalling over Rs 1,788 crore on five tyre manufacturers and their association. The penalty of Rs 1,337.76 crore imposed on Google in the Android matter in October 2022 was largely upheld by the appellate tribunal in March 2023, with some of the accompanying directions set aside. Each of these orders was, at announcement, reported as a sum the State had won. Each then spent years in the corridor, and what the exchequer eventually received from each is a different and smaller story that the headline never returns to tell.

Recovery is weak for mechanical as much as legal reasons. A penalty becomes payable on the Commission’s demand under section 39 and the recovery regulations made in 2011, which route an unpaid penalty into the modes of tax recovery; but an appellant who deposits a quarter of the penalty and obtains a stay of the balance has little reason to hurry, the tribunal’s lists are crowded by the insolvency docket whose statutory timelines outrank competition appeals, and a matter that returns to the Commission on remand restarts the clock entirely. Leniency illustrates the institution’s quieter successes by contrast. Under section 46 and the lesser penalty regulations, the first cartel member to disclose and cooperate may receive a reduction of up to the whole penalty, and the first lesser penalty order was passed in 2017 in a cartel for brushless DC fans used in railway ventilation. Leniency outcomes never appear in the imposed aggregate at their true value, because the information a leniency applicant delivers is worth more than the penalty it escapes: it converts suspicion into a record. An assessment that counts only announced penalties therefore undervalues the institution’s investigative harvest even as it overvalues its collections.

The combinations docket presents the opposite asymmetry. Merger review is the Commission’s highest-volume adjudicatory work, conducted against statutory clocks, and the overwhelming pattern across the docket is clearance, most filings being approved without modification and a small minority approved with remedies or after a fuller investigation. The deemed approval sanction and the green channel route introduced in 2019 for filings with no overlaps at all keep routine transactions moving. It is precisely because this docket works to a deadline that the quorum failure of 2022 and 2023 struck there first: conduct cases can wait out a vacancy, merger clocks cannot.

The critics, the defenders, and a verdict

The critical case against the institution, in its strongest form, runs as follows. Investigations take years, and the interval between information and order in contested cartel and dominance matters is measured in half-decades once writ proceedings and remands are counted. The Director General’s office is thin for the work assigned to it, particularly in digital and multi-market cases where the evidence is technical and the respondents are advised at the highest level. A large share of orders do not survive appeal intact, which suggests defects of reasoning or evidence at the point of decision. Recovery is poor enough to convert large penalties into press releases. The BusinessLine’s description of the Commission as a regulatory stepchild, in an editorial written after the quorum failures of 2023, captured the appointment side of the case: vacancies at the Commission linger in a way that vacancies at the Reserve Bank or the securities regulator do not, because the institution lacks a political constituency that punishes delay.

The defending case is also serious. The Commission received its substantive powers only in 2009 and merger control in 2011, and in the period since it has built a decisional practice, a body of orders on market definition, cartel proof and abuse, essentially from nothing, in a legal system where the predecessor regime had produced almost no usable doctrine in four decades. Appellate correction at the rate the record shows is unremarkable for a young regulator whose statute asks novel economic questions; the European Commission and the American agencies lose cases too, and a tribunal that never disturbed the regulator’s orders would be evidence of appellate failure rather than regulatory success. Deterrence, on this view, operates through the existence and unpredictability of enforcement: the compliance programmes, dawn raid protocols and leniency calculations inside Indian boardrooms are the institution’s real product, and none of them is measured by the recovery column. The Competition Law Review Committee’s report of 2019, the most thorough official examination of the system, treated the framework as fundamentally sound and directed its recommendations at calibration: settlements and commitments to shorten cases, clearer penalty guidance, and capacity building, a reform list the amendment of 2023 substantially enacted.

The verdict this profile reaches follows from its own counting. The institution’s investigative capacity, while improvable, is not its binding constraint: the Commission finds cases, builds records and passes orders at a rate that keeps every large Indian industry aware of it. Its binding constraint sits downstream, in an appellate corridor that was stripped of its specialist forum in 2017 and in a recovery machinery that converts one rupee of announced penalty into about one paisa of collection on the figures the Government itself cited. Reform aimed at the Commission’s front end, more powers, wider prohibitions, larger penalties, enlarges the number that is already misleading. Reform aimed at the corridor and the collection stage, a specialist bench, tribunal capacity, and recovery that does not wait upon a decade of appeals, addresses the point where the institution’s work goes to diminish.

Digital markets, and the work beyond cases

The Commission’s approach to digital markets has been built from the same instruments as the rest of its practice, applied to platform facts. Its market study of e-commerce, published in 2020, mapped platform neutrality, discounting and exclusivity concerns before several of them became cases. The dominance docket then took up the platform economy directly, most prominently in the Android proceedings concluded by the penalty order of October 2022, in which the Commission treated the licensing of a mobile operating system and the bundling of applications as conduct within section 4. Within the Commission, a Digital Markets and Data Unit was created in 2021 to supply the technical specialisation that platform cases demand, an institutional admission that generalist investigation was not keeping pace with the evidence in such matters. The harder question is whether an ex post system, which moves after conduct and takes years to conclude, can discipline markets that tip quickly. A Committee on Digital Competition Law appointed by the Ministry of Corporate Affairs reported in 2024 with a draft Digital Competition Bill proposing ex ante obligations for the largest platforms, on the model of the European Union’s Digital Markets Act. The proposal would add a second, preventive jurisdiction alongside the Commission’s conduct jurisdiction rather than replace it, and its fate rests with Parliament. The Commission’s own position in the debate is the institutionally predictable one: it administers the Act it has, builds platform doctrine case by case, and treats the ex ante proposal as a question for the legislature rather than a gap it can fill by interpretation.

Beyond the dockets, section 49 gives the Commission a second vocation. On a reference from the Central or a State Government it renders opinions on the competition implications of proposed policies, and it is charged with taking suitable measures for competition advocacy, creating awareness and imparting training on competition issues. Its market studies, of e-commerce and of the pharmaceutical sector among others, are the visible product of that vocation: inquiries without respondents, published to move a sector’s practices before a case exists. Advocacy is easy to dismiss as the soft part of the mandate, and it is also the only part of the Commission’s work that operates before harm rather than after it. The institution’s full description is therefore double: a court-like body that decides cases on a record built by its investigator, and a standing adviser inside the state whose opinions and studies compete for the same members’ hours.

The second docket in depth: how merger review runs

Merger review deserves a fuller institutional account than the conduct chapters usually receive, because it is the half of the Commission where the institution behaves most like a licensing authority and least like a court. A combination above the section 5 thresholds may not take effect until the Commission has approved it or the statutory period has run out. The filing is made by the acquirer or the merging parties on a prescribed form with a fee graded to the transaction, and the review proceeds in two phases. In the first phase the Commission forms a prima facie opinion, ordinarily within thirty days under the law as amended in 2023, on whether the combination is likely to cause an appreciable adverse effect on competition. Most filings end there, with an approval order that is typically short and often records no conditions. A filing that raises prima facie concerns moves to a second phase: the Commission issues a show cause notice, may call for a report, publishes details of the combination for public knowledge and invites objections, and then decides among approval, approval with modifications designed to remove the adverse effect, and a direction that the combination shall not take effect. The outer clock disciplines the whole exercise: under the original design the combination stood approved if two hundred and ten days passed without a decision, and the amendment of 2023 reduced that outer period to one hundred and fifty days.

Two features of this docket explain its institutional character. The first is the green channel, introduced through the combination regulations in 2019, under which a filing whose parties have no horizontal overlaps, vertical relationships or complementary activities of the prescribed kinds is deemed approved on filing itself, on the strength of the parties’ declaration. The green channel is a confession by the institution that most of its merger traffic never needed a decision, and a device for reserving member time for the filings that do. The second feature is gun jumping discipline: a combination that closes without notification, or during the standstill, attracts penalty under section 43A, and the Commission has used that provision against transactions that treated clearance as a formality, which is how a review docket teaches a filing community to respect its clocks. The contrast with the conduct docket could not be sharper. Conduct cases begin in suspicion and end, years later, in contested orders; merger cases begin in disclosure and end, weeks later, in routine approvals. The same seven people, when they are seven, preside over both, and the quorum failure showed which docket the statute protects with a deemed approval and which it leaves to wait.

Settlements, commitments and the new closing machinery

For most of its working life the Commission had exactly two ways to end a conduct case: a closure order or a contravention order. The amendment of 2023 gave it two more, and both are institutional admissions about the cost of the corridor. Under section 48A, a party against whom an inquiry is pending for an agreement or abuse contravention may apply for settlement after the Director General’s report is received and before the final order, offering terms on which the Commission may close the matter with a settlement amount, without the full appellate exposure of a penalty order; a settlement decision is not appealable, though it does not bar a compensation claim by a person harmed. Under section 48B, a party may offer commitments earlier, after the investigation is directed and before the Director General reports, proposing changes to its conduct which, if accepted, end the inquiry without a finding. Both devices import into Indian practice the negotiated endings that mature systems use to convert scarce adjudicatory capacity into market correction at speed. Their institutional significance for this profile is the shift they mark: the Commission’s problem was never a shortage of findings to make, and the legislature’s answer in 2023 was to let it close suitable matters by agreement rather than to enlarge its powers of condemnation. Alongside the two devices, the same amendment armed the leniency regime with leniency plus, under which a cartel member under investigation who discloses a second, undisclosed cartel may earn an additional reduction in the first, and empowered the Commission under section 64B to publish guidelines, including on the computation of penalties, which produced the Commission’s penalty guidelines of 2024 and a measure of predictability in a discretion that appellate criticism had long targeted. A separate 2023 provision permits the Commission to continue proceedings against, and to proceed in the first instance against, the implementers and beneficiaries of a contravention through the hub and spoke widening of the cartel definition, which belongs to the substantive account rather than to this one.

The courts as the institution’s working environment

A regulator’s working environment includes the courts that surround it, and three bodies of litigation define the Commission’s. The first is the writ traffic in the High Courts, where respondents and occasionally informants challenge summonses, refusals of confidential treatment, prima facie directions and procedural orders. The Steel Authority proposition keeps most such challenges from halting investigations, but it does not keep them from consuming time, and the Commission’s officers litigate in the Delhi High Court and across the country as a standing cost of doing business. The second is the standing of informants, settled by the Supreme Court in Samir Agrawal v. Competition Commission of India in 2020: the Court held that an informant before the Commission need not show personal injury or a personal interest in the market, because the Commission acts in the public interest of competition and the information is a trigger rather than a plaint. The holding confirms the institutional character of the information route described earlier: the informant starts the machine and may appeal a closure, but the case belongs to the Commission. The third body of litigation concerns the boundary with specialised statutes, and its headline after Bharti Airtel is the Delhi High Court’s judgment of 2023 in the Ericsson litigation, which upheld the Commission’s jurisdiction to inquire into the licensing conduct of a holder of standard essential patents and rejected the argument that the Patents Act’s own controller displaced the competition inquiry, the distinction the Supreme Court had itself foreshadowed between a sector regulator deciding technical questions and an authority deciding the rights of individual parties. Together the three lines of cases describe an institution whose jurisdiction has been tested at every seam and has held, at the price of years spent defending the right to proceed.

Staff, divisions and the economics function

Below the members sits a secretariat whose structure explains much of the institution’s output. The Commission’s work is organised in divisions that mirror its functions: antitrust divisions that process information and conduct cases, a combination division that runs the merger docket, an economics division that supplies market definition and effects analysis, a legal division, and divisions for advocacy and capacity building and for international cooperation. Cases are distributed among divisions and the members who oversee them, and hearings are conducted by the Commission as a body, ordinarily with the Chairperson presiding. The Director General’s office, separately housed within the same statutory family, is staffed by officers drawn substantially from government services, including the Indian Economic Service and the police and revenue services for investigative work, supplemented by professionals engaged for specialised skills. The economics function deserves emphasis because it is the institution’s distinguishing organ: every contested order must define a relevant market and reason about effects, functions no purely legal staff can perform, and the quality of the Commission’s orders on appeal tracks the quality of the economic record beneath them. The Commission also maintains cooperation arrangements with counterpart authorities abroad, memoranda of understanding with the competition authorities of the United States and the European Union and Canada among others, and participates in the International Competition Network, channels through which investigative practice and leniency technique travel. What the institution does not have is regional presence: registry, hearings and the Director General’s office are concentrated in New Delhi, so an informant in a distant market deals with a national institution at a distance, a design choice inherited from the Act that advocacy programmes only partly offset.

The Commission inside the State: exemptions, directions and supersession

The Act also specifies, with unusual candour, the levers the executive retains over the institution it created. Section 54 empowers the Central Government to exempt an enterprise, a class of enterprises or a practice from the Act’s operation in the interest of national security or public interest, and the power has been used for defined sectors, including amalgamations of regional rural banks and of public sector banks, which proceed outside merger control by notification. Section 55 obliges the Commission, in exercising its powers and performing its functions, to be guided by such directions on questions of policy as the Central Government gives it in writing, with the Government’s decision on whether a question is one of policy made final by the section, though the Commission must be given an opportunity to express its views before a direction issues. Section 56 carries the heaviest lever: the Central Government may supersede the Commission for a period not exceeding six months on grounds that include persistent default in complying with directions, circumstances rendering the Commission unable to perform its functions, and public interest, after giving it a reasonable opportunity to be heard, whereupon the members vacate office and the Government discharges the Commission’s functions until reconstitution. Supersession has never been used. The three provisions together define the true constitutional position of the institution: decisionally independent in the cases before it, by tenure and by the removal safeguards described earlier, and structurally subordinate to the executive in policy, in exemptions and in the last resort of supersession. Assessments of the Commission that treat it either as a free-standing fourth branch or as a department of the Ministry of Corporate Affairs are both wrong in the same way, by reading only half of its statute.

Why recovery lags: the machinery after the order

Because the recovery gap is this profile’s central statistic, the machinery that produces it deserves a section of its own. A penalty imposed under section 27 becomes recoverable under section 39. The Commission issues a demand notice under the Competition Commission of India (Manner of Recovery of Monetary Penalty) Regulations, 2011, and if the amount is not paid within the period the notice specifies, the Commission may proceed by the modes the section provides, in substance recovering the sum through the machinery used for arrears of income tax, or by reference to the court and the other modes the section enumerates. Three frictions then intervene in almost every large case. The first is the appellate stay: the tribunal, on entertaining an appeal, may stay the recovery of the balance above the deposited quarter, and before the amendment of 2023 the practice of deposits varied by bench and by case, so a well-advised respondent could suspend nearly the whole liability for the life of the appeal. The second friction is the tribunal’s list: competition appeals share benches with insolvency appeals that carry their own statutory urgency and corporate mortality, and a competition appeal that is part heard across years is a familiar sight. The third friction is the remand: when the tribunal sets an order aside and returns the matter, the Commission must rehear, reorder and face a second appeal, and the recovery clock restarts from the new order. The deposit requirement of 2023 attacks only the first friction, and only prospectively in its full rigour. The fair conclusion, and the one the record supports, is that recovery is a property of the appellate system’s capacity rather than of the Commission’s will, which is why the announced aggregate and the collected aggregate diverge by two orders of magnitude and why comparisons of regulators by penalties announced are comparisons of the wrong variable.

Three ages of the institution

The Commission’s working life falls into three ages, and the transitions explain its present shape better than any single provision. The first age, from establishment in 2003 to the notification of sections 3 and 4 in 2009, was an age of design under litigation: the institution existed, acquired premises, staff and a seal, issued advocacy material, and waited while its constitution was challenged and then recast. Institutions rarely survive a six year gestation unchanged, and the Commission that began deciding cases in 2009 was the amended design, not the enacted one, with a judicially chaired selection committee above it and a specialist appellate tribunal beside it. The second age, from 2009 to 2017, was an age of construction: the first cartel and abuse orders, the first appellate corrections, the arrival of merger control in 2011, the building of the Director General’s investigative practice and of a filing community’s habits, all inside the institutional architecture the 2007 settlement had drawn. The Commission’s confidence in this age grew with its docket, and its orders lengthened as the tribunal’s criticisms taught it what a survivable order looks like. The third age, from 2017 onward, is an age of consolidation imposed from outside: the loss of the specialist tribunal in 2017, the executive rightsizing of its membership in 2018, the quorum failures of 2022 and 2023, and then the amendment of 2023, which simultaneously strengthened its closing machinery, taxed appeals against its penalties, transferred the Director General’s appointment into its own hands and subjected it, for the first time, to a statutory three year limitation on informations. The third age’s theme is that the institution’s environment has been repeatedly rearranged by actors other than itself, and that its record is the product of those rearrangements in equal measure with its own choices. A profile that ignored the ages and treated the Commission as a constant would misread every statistic it quoted.

The screening function: the docket the public never sees

For every information that becomes a case, several are closed at the threshold, and the screening function is where the Commission exercises its largest and least visible discretion. An information under section 19 must disclose material from which a contravention can be prima facie seen; informations that plead a commercial grievance, a contractual dispute or a pricing complaint without the elements of an agreement or of dominance are closed under section 26(2) with a reasoned order. The informant’s right to appeal a closure to the appellate tribunal disciplines the screening: a closure is an appealable order, and tribunals have remanded closures where the Commission’s threshold reasoning was perfunctory, so the screening order has itself become a reasoned genre. The economics of the gate matter. The Director General’s investigative capacity is the institution’s scarcest resource, and every weak investigation commissioned at the threshold is capacity withdrawn from a strong one; the prima facie stage is therefore, in effect, the Commission’s budget process, allocating investigative years among competing suspicions. Critics of the system sometimes measure the Commission by its closure rate and call it timidity; the same rate read from inside the institution is triage. The limitation period inserted by the amendment of 2023, three years from the cause of action subject to condonation for sufficient cause, adds a second gate at the same point, and its early administration will shape the docket as powerfully as the prima facie test has. What is certain is that the decided cases on which profiles like this one concentrate are the residue of a much larger flow of paper, most of which the institution exists to filter.

Hearings, evidence and the texture of proceedings

A contested case that survives investigation is decided at hearings whose texture differs from a civil trial in ways practitioners must internalise. The Commission is not bound by the Code of Civil Procedure; it regulates its own procedure under section 36, guided by natural justice, and it holds civil court powers for summoning witnesses, requiring documents and receiving evidence. Cross-examination is not a matter of right in the trial sense and is permitted as the Commission considers necessary, which concentrates the hearing on the documentary record and on economic evidence rather than on oral testimony. The amendment of 2023 strengthened the evidentiary side of the hearing by providing expressly for parties to call experts and have them depose, a change that formalises the role economists already played through written submissions. Confidentiality shapes the room: material admitted under confidential treatment is inspected under the regimes the general regulations create, sometimes through confidentiality rings confined to counsel and experts, so that a respondent can test the case against it without its commercial secrets changing hands. Orders are reserved after hearing and pronounced as a single institutional product; members who disagree may record their dissent, and dissenting opinions appear in the Commission’s practice, a feature borrowed from tribunal culture that has on occasion supplied the appellate tribunal with its line of attack. The hearing is also where the institution’s smallness is felt most directly: the same members who directed the investigation at the prima facie stage, and who may have read the Director General’s report with a forming view, sit to decide, a concentration the Supreme Court’s administrative characterisation of the prima facie stage is designed to render acceptable and which respondents continue to regard as the design’s least comfortable feature.

The missing second front: compensation and private enforcement

A mature competition system runs on two fronts: public enforcement by the authority and private enforcement by the victims, whose damages claims multiply deterrence without consuming the authority’s budget. India’s second front barely exists. Section 53N permits a person who has suffered loss or damage from a contravention established in a Commission order, or in an appellate finding, to apply to the appellate tribunal for compensation, and the provision extends to representative applications on behalf of a class of sufferers. In practice, compensation applications have been rare enough to be individually notable, and the tribunal’s compensation jurisprudence remains embryonic beside its appellate jurisprudence. The reasons are structural. A compensation claim must wait upon a final finding, and finality, for the reasons the recovery section gives, can take a decade; the applicant must then prove individual loss and causation in a forum without a developed practice of quantifying cartel overcharge; and the deposit and stay arrangements that govern the penalty do nothing to accelerate the victim’s separate claim. The consequence for the institution is that deterrence rests almost wholly on penalties, which are the very component whose recovery fails, so the system’s deterrent circuit has a single, leaky channel. The amendment of 2023 acknowledged the compensation route by connecting settlements to it, preserving a victim’s claim even where the Commission closes a matter by settlement, but the deeper obstacles of proof and delay are untouched. Profiles of foreign authorities treat follow-on damages as a routine sequel; the Indian sequel is a road the statute built and traffic has not come to, and any honest account of the Commission’s environment must record the emptiness of that road as part of the institution’s effective powers.

Advocacy and the opinion function in practice

The advocacy mandate of section 49 has produced a body of work that case counters miss. On references from governments, the Commission has rendered opinions on the competition implications of policies and draft measures, a channel through which competition analysis enters decisions on licensing, procurement and sectoral design before they harden; the opinions are advisory, and their influence is of the kind that does not announce itself. Its market studies operate in the same preventive register: the e-commerce study of 2020 and the pharmaceutical sector study that followed examined distribution margins, exclusivity and platform practices across whole sectors and published recommendations addressed to industry conduct as much as to government. Around those flagship products sits a routine output of advocacy booklets, training for public procurement officers and judicial and academic outreach, and state level engagement that attempts to plant competition assessment inside state policymaking, where much market foreclosure in India is actually authored through local licensing and procurement rules. The draft National Competition Policy, prepared under the earlier dispensation and never adopted as a whole, survives in fragments inside this practice. The institutional point is that advocacy is the Commission’s only instrument that operates ex ante across the whole economy at negligible marginal cost per market touched, and its underfunding relative to the adjudicatory docket is a choice about what kind of regulator India wants, made implicitly in every budget round. An institution assessed only on its orders will always look weaker than an institution assessed on its orders plus the conduct that its studies and opinions quietly changed, though the second quantity is, by its nature, the one nobody can count, which is precisely the counting problem this profile began with, appearing again in its gentlest form.

Penalty practice inside the institution

The penalty is the Commission’s signature act, and its internal practice has developed conventions that the bare section does not reveal. Penalty is argued as a distinct stage of the hearing: after contravention is found, the parties address quantum, and the Commission’s orders conventionally work through the contravention’s duration, the respondent’s role, aggravating and mitigating circumstances, and the turnover base to which the statutory percentage is applied. The meaning of that turnover base generated the system’s most consequential quantum litigation, resolved by the Supreme Court in Excel Crop Care Limited v. Competition Commission of India in 2017 in favour of a relevant turnover approach confined to the products and services implicated in the contravention, a doctrine subsequently displaced by the amendment of 2023 in favour of a global turnover base, as the amendment trail in this series records; the institutional point for this profile is that for six years every penalty the Commission computed stood on a judicially narrowed base, and the appellate reductions of those years cannot be understood without knowing which base the order under appeal had used. Penalty also reaches natural persons: where a contravention is by a company, the persons in charge of and responsible for its conduct may be proceeded against and penalised as a percentage of their own income under the scheme of section 48, and Commission orders routinely name directors and officers alongside the enterprise, a practice that changes settlement behaviour inside companies because the individuals’ exposure cannot be indemnified away as easily as the corporation’s. Around the main penalty stand the Act’s satellite offences and defaults: penalties for failure to comply with the Commission’s directions, for non-compliance with combination notification and standstill obligations under section 43A, for false statements and omission of material information, and prosecution exposure for contravention of the Commission’s orders themselves under section 42, where continued defiance after notice may be taken to the criminal court. The penalty guidelines published in 2024 under the new section 64B power were intended to regularise this discretion by stating the Commission’s approach to computation in advance, and whether they harden into doctrine will depend on the appellate tribunal’s reception of them in the first appeals where they are invoked. What the institution has learned, across all of this, is that a penalty is not a number but an argument, and that orders which show the argument survive while orders which announce the number do not.

Where informations come from: the informant economy

The conduct docket’s raw material arrives through channels whose character shapes the cases. Trade associations feature on both sides of the file, as informants against members’ rivals and as respondents whose own price circulars and meeting records supply the evidence. Former employees and distributors, terminated dealers and unsuccessful bidders form the classic informant classes of cartel and abuse practice respectively, because each holds documents the market never published. References arrive from ministries, state governments and sector regulators encountering conduct in their own proceedings, and the Commission’s own motion power converts press reporting, market studies and patterns visible across decided cases into inquiries without an informant at all. Leniency applications are the channel with the highest evidentiary yield, and their confidentiality is protected because a disclosed applicant invites retaliation in the market it must continue to trade in. The Commission publishes its orders, and a substantial run of its decisional output is publicly available, which has made the institution unusually legible to researchers: the orders are the archive of Indian competition doctrine, cited, taught and mined, and the transparency itself functions as advocacy, since a general counsel anywhere in the country can read exactly what the Commission did to a comparable firm. The registry’s case numbering, the practice of issuing public versions of orders with confidential material redacted, and the annual report’s statistical annexes complete a publicity apparatus that is easy to overlook in a profile of powers. An institution that publishes its reasoning invites the appellate and academic scrutiny that disciplines it, and the Commission’s willingness to be read is one of the under-credited explanations for the improvement in its order quality across its second age.

A national institution in a federal economy

The Commission’s jurisdiction runs to the whole of India and to conduct outside India with effects inside it, and its docket has reached sectors as various as real estate, cement, tyres, pharmaceuticals, broadcasting, film distribution, public procurement, railways ancillary services, coal, beer, automobile distribution and digital platforms. That spread is itself an institutional fact: unlike sector regulators, whose statutes confine them to an industry, the Commission is a generalist by design, and its members must reason about markets they may never have worked in, on the strength of the record and the economics division’s analysis. The federal dimension is quieter but real. Agriculture marketing, local trade and much procurement sit within state fields, and the Commission’s instruments there are its enterprise definition, which reaches state instrumentalities carrying on commercial activity, and its advocacy channel to state governments under section 49. The Coal India settlement fixes the governing principle at the top of the system: charter and ownership do not matter, function does. What the Commission cannot do is compel a state to redesign a foreclosure built into a state statute, because a statute is not an agreement or an abuse within the Act’s reach; the boundary between reviewing conduct under law and reviewing the law itself is the institution’s outer wall, and several of its most politically charged informations have broken against it. The wall is worth naming in a profile, because it explains a class of closures that read, from outside, as timidity and are, from inside, jurisdiction.

What the appellate corridor actually does to orders

The appellate tribunal’s work on Commission orders falls into recognisable kinds, and distinguishing them refines the raw survival statistics. Some appeals correct procedure: the cement rehearing is the type case, where the tribunal found that the order had been signed by a member who had not heard the parties, set the order aside on that natural justice ground alone, and left the Commission free to decide again, which it did, with the second order surviving. Some appeals correct doctrine: early orders were returned or read down for inadequate treatment of the relevant market, of the section 19(3) and 19(4) factors, or of the evidence said to connect a respondent to an agreement, and the Commission’s later order-writing conventions are substantially the tribunal’s syllabus absorbed. Some appeals correct quantum, reducing penalties whose computation had run ahead of the doctrine of the day, most visibly in the years when the turnover base was contested and then judicially narrowed. And some appeals fail outright, confirming orders in terms that convert a Commission finding into appellate precedent, as happened to several of the largest abuse and cartel orders of the second age. A survival rate stated without this anatomy conceals the corridor’s productive function: the tribunal is the institution’s external examiner, and a regulator whose orders were never disturbed would be one whose examiner had stopped reading. The genuine institutional concern is not the correction rate but the calendar: corrections delivered after five or eight years arrive in markets that have reorganised themselves in the interval, and a remedy for conduct in a market that no longer exists in its earlier form is a remedy addressed to history. Speed, rather than severity or doctrine, is the corridor’s scarcest commodity, and it is the one commodity neither the Commission nor the tribunal can manufacture alone, because it depends on benches, lists and the insolvency docket’s competing statutory claims.

The comparison the institution invites: the securities regulator

Indian lawyers habitually measure the Commission against the Securities and Exchange Board of India, and the comparison is instructive because the two institutions were built on different theories. The securities regulator combines investigation, adjudication by its own officers, and a recovery machinery with powers of attachment and sale that the company law tradition gave it, and its penalties are recovered at rates the Commission cannot approach, partly because its statute lets it move against assets with a directness the Competition Act’s tax-arrear route does not attempt. Its appellate forum, the Securities Appellate Tribunal, is a specialist body that has survived every consolidation round that dissolved the competition and intellectual property tribunals, an asymmetry the competition community notices. The comparison cuts the other way on substance: securities adjudication deals in defined disclosures and market conduct documented in exchange records, while competition adjudication must construct its market, its counterfactual and often its evidence from the respondents’ own files, so the Commission’s task is epistemically harder even where its machinery is weaker. The fair conclusion is institutional rather than invidious. Where the Indian state has wanted recovery and specialisation, it has known how to legislate for both, and the Commission’s deficits in those two respects are choices embedded in its statute and in the Finance Act of 2017, not discoveries about the character of its members. That is also why the reform prescription offered earlier in this profile is addressed to Parliament and the executive rather than to the Commission itself.

How to read a Commission order

Because the orders are the institution’s public archive, a short guide to their anatomy serves the counsel, researcher and student readers of this profile alike. A contested order conventionally opens with the information and the parties, recites the prima facie direction and the course of the investigation, summarises the Director General’s findings and the parties’ objections to them, and then frames the issues. The analytical core follows: the determination of the relevant market, the assessment of the impugned conduct against the statutory factors, and the findings on contravention, each finding tied to the documents and data on the record. The operative part closes the document: the directions, the penalty with its computation shown, the treatment of individuals proceeded against, and the consequential directions about compliance reporting. Three reading habits repay adoption. The first is to read the objections section before the findings, because the Commission’s reasoning is dialogic and its findings answer the objections it has just recorded. The second is to attend to what the order does with the Director General’s report where the two diverge, since divergence points are where appellate vulnerability concentrates. The third is to separate the order’s findings of fact from its characterisations, because the tribunal reviews the two with different intensities and the characterisations, about markets and effects, are where doctrine is made. An order read this way yields not only its result but the institution’s method, which is why the orders, rather than summaries of them, are the correct primary source for the enforcement record discussed throughout this article.

The institution measuring itself

The Commission reports on itself through its annual report, laid before Parliament, whose statistical annexes record informations received, prima facie directions, investigations ordered and completed, orders passed and combinations disposed of, and through the advocacy and capacity building reporting that accompanies them. Self-measurement by a regulator deserves the same discipline as external measurement. The annual figures count activities, and activities are inputs; the outcomes that matter, deterred cartels, corrected markets, recovered penalties, are either invisible or recorded by other hands, in the tribunal’s disposals and the exchequer’s receipts. The institution’s own publications, read carefully, support this profile’s central distinction rather than contradicting it: they document a body that processes a large and growing flow of work with professional competence, and they do not claim that the flow’s end product is collection. Where independent measurement exists, in the appellate statistics compiled during the amendment debates and in the ministry’s own recovery figure, it points the same way. The Commission’s transparency about its inputs, set against the corridor’s arithmetic about its outputs, is the complete picture, and either half quoted alone is a misdescription.

Search and seizure in practice

The dawn raid is the investigative power around which the institution’s reputation in boardrooms is built, and its history tracks the office’s maturation. For the first decade the Director General’s evidence gathering ran on summonses and requisitions, effective against documents a respondent chose to preserve and produce. The first search operations were carried out in 2019, in an investigation into suspected cartelisation in the trade in pulses, when the Director General’s teams searched the premises of commodity trading firms in Mumbai and Delhi, an operation reported at the time as the office’s first use of the power and one that announced to the filing and advisory community that the investigative stage had acquired teeth. Search practice since then has followed the pattern the power implies: simultaneous entry at multiple premises in the early morning, forensic imaging of devices and servers, seizure of documents under inventory, and statements recorded on oath in the days that follow. The safeguards are procedural and worth stating, because they define the power’s legality: authorisation through the judicial route the statute prescribes, the presence of independent witnesses, inventories of seized material supplied to the occupants, and the respondent’s remedies against excess in the writ jurisdiction of the High Courts, which have entertained challenges to particular searches without disturbing the power itself. The amendment of 2023 completed the codification by writing the search power into section 41 in terms, detached from the borrowed company law machinery through which it had earlier been traced. Institutionally, the raid matters out of proportion to its frequency, which remains low: a power used rarely and visibly disciplines the documents of everyone who might one day be searched, and the compliance advice given in Indian boardrooms about record retention and messaging applications is written in the shadow of a handful of mornings in 2019 and since.

The order is the middle of the process

Return to the fact with which this profile began. The Commission was established on 14 October 2003 and armed in stages between 2009 and 2011; it is composed of a Chairperson and up to six Members chosen through a selection committee chaired by the Chief Justice or a nominee, a design forced by the constitutional challenge that reshaped the institution before it decided a single case; its investigations are conducted by a Director General whom the Commission itself appoints after the amendment of 2023; its orders run from cease and desist directions to penalties and, on paper, to the division of a dominant enterprise; its appeals travel to a generalist appellate tribunal whose chair it lost in 2017; and its penalty record, on the figures its own sponsoring ministry cited, recovers about one per cent of what it imposes. None of that makes the Commission a failure. It makes it an institution whose output must be read at the right stage of its own process. The order is the middle of the process, not the end, and an assessment of the regulator based on the value of penalties announced measures the beginning of an appellate and recovery story whose outcome is determined elsewhere. The Commission’s next decade of institutional history will be written less in its orders than in the corridor beyond them.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How is the Competition Commission of India constituted?

The Commission is constituted under section 7 of the Competition Act, 2002 and consists, under section 8, of a Chairperson and not less than two and not more than six other Members, all appointed by the Central Government as whole-time office holders. Each must be a person of ability, integrity and standing with at least fifteen years of professional experience in a listed field such as economics, law, finance, commerce, management or competition matters. Appointments are made from a panel recommended by a selection committee under section 9, chaired by the Chief Justice of India or a nominee and including the Secretaries for Corporate Affairs and Law and Justice and two experts. The term is five years, with eligibility for reappointment, subject to an age ceiling of sixty five.

Q: What does the Director General investigate?

The Director General investigates contraventions of the Competition Act when the Commission, on forming a prima facie opinion under section 26(1), directs an investigation. The subject matter is the conduct the Act prohibits: anti-competitive agreements including cartels, abuse of a dominant position, and, on the combination side, matters arising from merger filings and suspected closings without approval. The office investigates; it does not decide. Equipped under section 41 with civil court powers of summons, document production and examination on oath, and with search and seizure under judicial authorisation, the Director General gathers the evidence, records statements and submits a report with findings to the Commission, which hears the parties on the report and passes the final order.

Q: How does a competition investigation proceed from information to final order?

The path begins when information is filed by any person, a reference arrives from a government or statutory authority, or the Commission acts on its own motion under section 19. The Commission first screens the matter: if no prima facie case appears, it closes the matter under section 26(2), a closure the informant may appeal. If a prima facie case appears, it directs the Director General to investigate under section 26(1), a direction the Supreme Court has held to be administrative and not appealable. The Director General reports; the Commission supplies the report to the parties, receives objections, may order further investigation, holds a hearing, and passes a final order under section 27, which may direct discontinuance of the conduct and impose a penalty.

Q: Where does an appeal from the Competition Commission go?

An appeal from the Commission’s appealable orders, including final orders under section 27, division and combination orders and closure orders, lies to the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal under section 53A, within sixty days of the order’s communication. That tribunal inherited the jurisdiction in May 2017 when the Finance Act, 2017 merged the dedicated Competition Appellate Tribunal, which had heard competition appeals from 2009, into it. After the amendment of 2023, an appeal against a penalty order is not entertained unless the appellant deposits twenty five per cent of the penalty. From the appellate tribunal a further appeal lies to the Supreme Court under section 53T, within sixty days, on a question of law.

Q: Why was the Commission’s original design challenged?

The original design of 2002 concentrated regulatory and adjudicatory functions in one body whose Chairperson needed no judicial qualification, although the body would inquire, investigate and impose penalties. In Brahm Dutt v. Union of India, decided by the Supreme Court in 2005, that design was challenged on the ground that a body exercising such adjudicatory functions should be structured on the tribunal model with judicial leadership. The Court did not strike the Act down, because the Union of India stated in the proceedings that it would amend the Act to restructure the Commission as a regulatory and expert body with a separate appellate tribunal chaired by a judicial appointee. The Competition (Amendment) Act, 2007 carried out that restructuring, created the Competition Appellate Tribunal and rewrote the appointment machinery.

Q: What happened when the Competition Commission lacked a quorum?

When the Chairperson’s term expired on 25 October 2022, the Commission was left with two Members, one of whom served as Acting Chairperson, against a quorum requirement of three Members for transacting business. The merger docket could not simply wait, because notified combinations are deemed approved if the statutory period expires undecided. The Commission continued to act, clearing combinations, in reliance on section 15, which saves its proceedings from invalidity by reason of a vacancy, and on the doctrine of necessity, after taking the Attorney General’s opinion. The position lasted about seven months, until a new Chairperson assumed charge on 23 May 2023, and a briefer recurrence followed later that year when the two Members demitted office in turn.

Q: What has the competition enforcement record been?

The record must be counted in three separate figures. On imposition, the figures cited by the Ministry of Corporate Affairs in support of the deposit provision in the amendment of 2023 put aggregate penalties imposed since enforcement began at nearly twenty thousand crore rupees. On survival, an analysis of the appellate tribunal’s disposals between 2009 and 2021 counted 556 appeals disposed of, of which 219 were allowed, against 1,030 orders passed by the Commission, of which 333 were appealed. On recovery, the ministry’s figures put the amount actually recovered at about one per cent of the amount imposed. The order is therefore the middle of the enforcement process: roughly a third of orders are appealed, about two in five of those appeals succeed in whole or part, and collection is a small fraction of announcement.

Q: How does the Competition Commission approach digital markets?

The Commission approaches digital markets with the same statutory instruments it applies elsewhere, adapted to platform facts. Its market study of e-commerce, published in 2020, examined platform neutrality, discounting and exclusivity across the sector before several of those concerns became cases. On the enforcement side, its dominance docket has addressed platform conduct directly, most prominently in the Android proceedings that ended with a penalty order in October 2022. Institutionally, it created a Digital Markets and Data Unit in 2021 to supply technical specialisation for platform evidence. The larger design question, whether ex post case-by-case enforcement suffices for markets that tip quickly, is being debated outside the Commission: a Committee on Digital Competition Law reported in 2024 with a draft bill proposing ex ante obligations for the largest platforms, a proposal that rests with Parliament.

Q: Who can file information before the Competition Commission?

Any person may file information alleging a contravention of sections 3 or 4 of the Act, and the route is equally open to a consumer, a consumer association or a trade association; the Central Government, a State Government or a statutory authority may instead make a reference. The informant need not be a victim of the conduct or a participant in the market: the Supreme Court held in Samir Agrawal v. Competition Commission of India, in 2020, that an informant need show no personal injury, because the Commission acts in the public interest and the information is a trigger for its inquiry rather than a plaint. A filing fee prescribed by the regulations, graded to the informant, accompanies the information. The informant receives the Commission’s closure order if the matter is screened out, and may appeal that closure to the appellate tribunal.

Q: Does the Competition Commission need a complaint before it can open a case?

No. Section 19 empowers the Commission to inquire into an alleged contravention on its own motion, without any information or reference, in addition to acting on information from any person and on references from governments and statutory authorities. In practice, own motion inquiries have been opened on the basis of press reporting, patterns visible in decided cases, market studies and material emerging from other proceedings, and the power matters most where victims are too dispersed or too dependent on the respondents to file, as in some platform and public procurement matters. The procedural protections do not change with the door used: the Commission must still form a prima facie opinion before directing an investigation under section 26(1), and the respondent’s hearing and appeal rights attach in the same way.

Q: Can a company appeal against the order that starts an investigation?

No. The direction under section 26(1), by which the Commission records a prima facie opinion and sends the matter to the Director General for investigation, is not an appealable order. The Supreme Court settled the point in Competition Commission of India v. Steel Authority of India Limited, in 2010: the direction is administrative in character, decides nothing about the respondent’s rights, and is not among the orders listed as appealable in section 53A. The first appealable moment is the final order. A respondent’s protections therefore sit elsewhere: in the right to receive the investigation report, to object, to be heard before the final order, and to appeal that order. Respondents do file writ petitions against investigation directions in the High Courts, but the settled position rarely allows the investigation itself to be halted.

Q: What interim relief can the Competition Commission grant during an inquiry?

Section 33 empowers the Commission, during an inquiry and before its conclusion, to restrain a party temporarily from carrying on an act that contravenes sections 3, 4 or 6, where it is satisfied that such an act has been committed, continues to be committed or is about to be committed. The power is exercised sparingly, because it intervenes on a prima facie view before findings are made, and the Commission must record its satisfaction and give the affected party a hearing within the scheme of the section. An interim order operates until the inquiry concludes or the Commission directs otherwise, and it is among the orders appealable to the appellate tribunal. In practice the power matters most in fast-moving markets, where the conduct complained of would complete itself, by excluding a rival or closing a transaction, long before a final order could be passed.

Q: How is a Competition Commission penalty recovered if the enterprise refuses to pay?

The penalty becomes recoverable under section 39 once the Commission issues a demand under the Competition Commission of India (Manner of Recovery of Monetary Penalty) Regulations, 2011 and the amount remains unpaid after the notice period. The Commission may then recover the sum through the modes the section provides, in substance treating it as an arrear recoverable through the income tax recovery machinery, among the other modes the section enumerates. Two features of practice dominate the statutory scheme. An appellant who has deposited twenty five per cent of the penalty under the amendment of 2023 will ordinarily obtain a stay of the balance while the appeal is pending, so recovery waits on the appeal. And where the appellate tribunal sets an order aside and remands the matter, recovery can begin again only from the fresh order, which is why collected amounts trail imposed amounts so far behind.

Q: What deposit must accompany an appeal against a penalty after the amendment of 2023?

An appellant against an order imposing a penalty must deposit twenty five per cent of the penalty amount before the appeal is entertained, under the condition the Competition (Amendment) Act, 2023 inserted into the appellate scheme of section 53B. The deposit is a condition of admission, not a fee: the appeal is not taken up unless the deposit is made, although the deposited amount remains subject to the outcome of the appeal. The provision was defended by the Government on the ground that aggregate penalties imposed stood near twenty thousand crore rupees while recovery stood near one per cent, with appeals functioning as an inexpensive stay. It was criticised by practitioners on the tribunal’s own disposal figures, which showed about forty per cent of disposed appeals between 2009 and 2021 being allowed, as a tax on a working error-correction mechanism.

Q: How can a member of the Competition Commission be removed from office?

Removal is governed by section 11 of the Act. The Central Government may remove the Chairperson or a Member on specified grounds, which include insolvency, conviction for an offence involving moral turpitude in the Government’s opinion, taking up outside paid employment during the term, physical or mental incapacity, acquiring an interest likely to affect the member’s functions prejudicially, and abuse of the position so as to render continuance prejudicial to the public interest. For the gravest and most judgment-laden grounds, abuse of position and prejudicial interest, the Act interposes the Supreme Court: removal follows only after the Court, on a reference made to it, inquires and reports that the member ought to be removed. A member may also resign by writing to the Central Government, and otherwise holds office for the five year term subject to the age ceiling of sixty five.

Q: What does the Competition Commission do apart from deciding cases?

Under section 49 the Commission renders opinions on references from the Central and State Governments about the effect of proposed policies on competition, and it is charged with competition advocacy: creating awareness of competition issues and imparting training. Its market studies, published inquiries without respondents into sectors such as e-commerce and pharmaceuticals, are the visible product of that side of the mandate, examining practices across a whole sector and recommending changes before any case exists. The Commission also engages in capacity building for public officials, including procurement officers, participates in international competition networks and cooperation arrangements with counterpart authorities abroad, and publishes its orders and an annual report laid before Parliament. This preventive work is the only part of the institution’s output that operates before harm rather than after it.

Q: How does the merger review docket differ from the conduct docket inside the Commission?

The two dockets run on opposite logics. A conduct case begins in suspicion, proceeds without a statutory outer limit for the inquiry, and ends in a contested order that is frequently appealed. A merger filing begins in compulsory disclosure, runs on statutory clocks, a prima facie opinion ordinarily within thirty days and an outer period, one hundred and fifty days after the amendment of 2023, after which the combination stands deemed approved, and ends overwhelmingly in clearance, with a minority of filings approved subject to modifications. The green channel route, introduced in 2019, deems filings with no overlaps of the prescribed kinds approved on filing itself. The difference shows institutionally when vacancies bite: conduct cases can wait out a gap in the Commission’s strength, while merger clocks cannot, which is why the quorum failure of 2022 and 2023 struck the merger docket first.

Q: Can the Competition Commission rectify or review its own order?

Yes, within limits. Section 37 empowers the Commission to review its own orders, and the Commission’s regulatory scheme provides for the rectification of mistakes apparent on the record, such as clerical and arithmetical errors, so that the text of an order can be corrected without reopening its reasoning. Review is not an appeal in disguise: it does not permit a party to reargue the merits because it dislikes the outcome, and a party whose real grievance is the findings or the penalty must use the appeal to the appellate tribunal within the sixty day period. The boundary matters in practice because the appeal clock runs from the original order, and time spent pursuing an untenable review does not suspend it. Orders may also be revisited by the Commission where the appellate tribunal remands the matter, which is a separate and common route back.

Q: What happens when the Director General reports that no contravention is made out?

The Commission is not bound to close the matter automatically, and the informant is not left without a voice. Under section 26, when the Director General’s report recommends that no contravention is established, the Commission forwards the report to the governments concerned and to the informant or the parties, invites objections, and after considering them may close the matter under section 26(6) or, if it disagrees with the report, order a further inquiry under section 26(7) or proceed to consider the matter itself. A closure on a no-contravention report is an appealable order, and the informant may carry it to the appellate tribunal. The design keeps the investigator advisory: the Director General’s negative report starts a structured reconsideration, with the informant heard, rather than ending the case by itself.

Q: Who appoints the Director General, and how did the amendment of 2023 change that appointment?

For the first two decades of the Commission’s life the Director General was appointed by the Central Government by notification under section 16. The Competition (Amendment) Act, 2023 transferred the appointment to the Competition Commission itself, acting with the prior approval of the Central Government, a change examined in this series’ account of that amendment. The shift moves the investigator inside the institution’s own chain of responsibility, completing its formal autonomy, while the prior approval requirement retains an executive check. The change has a design sensitivity: the original separation, under which the government appointed both the adjudicators and their investigator, kept a visible distance between the office that builds the record and the body that judges it, and the amendment thins that distance in exchange for institutional coherence.