India’s securities regulator has unveiled a comprehensive IT Resilience Index and strengthened disaster-recovery requirements for market infrastructure institutions to prevent operational failures and enhance market confidence.
India’s markets regulator has sharpened its focus on technology risk, unveiling a set of tighter disaster-recovery rules for exchanges and other market infrastructure institutions. The new approach is aimed at reducing the chance that a systems failure, cyber incident or other operational shock could interrupt trading, clearing or settlement, according to reports in the Economic Times and other industry coverage.
At the centre of the changes is a new IT Resilience Index, or ITRI, framework for market infrastructure institutions, including stock exchanges, clearing corporations and depositories. The Economic Times reported that the 100-point model will assess nine parameters twice a year and require early-warning tools and real-time monitoring by February 2027. Separate summaries of the circular said the framework is designed to give institutions a common way to measure the health of critical systems and spot weaknesses before they cause outages.
The regulator is also pushing institutions to tighten backup and recovery procedures. Market participants will need to run more demanding mock drills, strengthen data-recovery capabilities and improve stress testing of data centres. That matters because these institutions sit at the core of India’s securities market, where technology systems must stay available, secure and recoverable even under strain, as noted in the August circular summaries.
For compliance officers and disaster-recovery teams, the message is clear: continuity planning is moving from periodic paperwork to continuous readiness. The changes are likely to mean more investment in staff training, testing, monitoring and automation. They also reflect a broader regulatory view that operational failures are no longer just a firm-level problem, but a potential risk to market confidence and financial stability.
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