Commitment and Settlement Scheme Under the Indian Competition Law: A Step Towards Better Enforcement of the Law

Abstract

This paper makes an attempt to study the commitment and settlement scheme, introduced by the Ministry of Corporate Affairs in the Competition (Amendment) Bill, 2020. The authors in order to dig deeper, have looked into similar schemes known by various other names in the European Union and the United States to analyse the potential successes and limitations in the Indian context. The said scheme, at its genesis, seeks to strengthen the public enforcement agency of nodal competition regulator. In furtherance, the authors have analyzed the 107 violation orders passed by the Competition Commission of India over a period of ten years (May 2009 – December 2018) to assess the applicability of the scheme in the Indian context. As per the results, it was realized that only 14 per cent of the violations found by the Commission were initiated on its own, and rest 86 per cent of the cases were initiated by private parties. The paper also forays into assessing its impact on the faster disposal of cases, and on some of the negotiation tools present in the Indian context of such a scheme. The authors conclude the paper by stating that even though the said scheme is yet to be enforced, experiences abroad and the data compiled for India over ten years would suggest that the road ahead is likely to be rockier than rosy for the Commission. It would be more prudent for Indian lawmakers to first rely on the experience abroad, and relate it with the experiences closer home to formulate a more robust competition law regime.

Keywords: Indian competition law, commitment scheme, settlement scheme, leneiency programme, amnesty scheme, enforcement