India’s securities regulator, Sebi, has announced plans to tighten technology-resilience norms for exchanges, clearing houses, and depositories to enhance disaster recovery and system safeguards amid increasing market complexities.
India’s markets regulator has proposed a tighter technology-resilience regime for exchanges, clearing houses and depositories, with a shorter and more focused approach to disaster-recovery drills and stronger tests for critical systems.
According to the Securities and Exchange Board of India, the new framework would require market infrastructure institutions to run disaster-recovery exercises on non-working days and complete the switchover from the primary data centre to the backup site within a drill lasting at least four hours. The move follows requests from exchanges, especially those handling commodity derivatives, where some sessions run until late at night, making full-session testing difficult for market participants and operators alike.
Sebi said the drills would still need to mirror real trading conditions closely, covering all major market-operation scenarios and using loads similar to actual participation levels. The regulator also wants exchanges and other institutions to test a wider range of failure scenarios, with detailed case lists reviewed by its standing committee on technology.
Beyond drill timing, the proposal would strengthen scrutiny of primary data centres through more extensive stress tests and mock checks. These would go beyond order flow and transaction volumes to include database records, table sizes, master data and other non-transactional systems that can also cause outages if they fail.
The regulator is also seeking new safeguards for restoring trade data if replication is disrupted at a near site or disaster-recovery site. Exchanges and clearing corporations would need standard operating procedures for recovering lost data in such cases.
The consultation comes alongside Sebi’s broader push to quantify technology strength at market infrastructure institutions. Moneycontrol reported that the regulator has already mandated an IT Resilience Index, a 100-point scorecard for exchanges, clearing corporations and depositories that must be calculated twice a year and is due to be fully operational by February 28, 2027.
Sebi has invited public comments on the latest proposals until October 5.
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