572 investor awareness programmes organised in 2-yrs: Govt

To protect the interests of investors as well as educate them, the Ministry of Corporate Affairs organised as many as 572 investor awareness programmes in rural areas in two years, Parliament was informed today.
During 2014-15 and 2015-16, a total of 572 investor awareness programmes were organised in rural areas, Minister of State for Corporate Affairs Arjun Ram Meghwal said in a written reply to the Lok Sabha.
These programmes were organised through common services centre (CSC) under Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology.
Besides, a total of 4,629 programmes have been organised by the ministry in the past three years through professional institutes -- Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI), Institute of Company Secretaries of India (ICSI) and the Institute of Cost Accountants of India.

These programmes were organised with the objective of creating awareness amongst the investor about fraudulent schemes and facilitating informed investment decisions, the minister said.
Such programmes were conducted in Hindi, English and other vernacular languages depending upon the target audience, he added.

For these programmes, an amount of Rs 1.5 crore earmarked under Investor Awareness and Protection Fund (IEPF) in the current fiscal, of this Rs 1.06 crore have been utilised.
In addition, Rs 4.40 crore was used in 2015-16 for such programmes of the allocated Rs 4.5 crore.
Serious Fraud Investigation Office (SFIO), which comes under the corporate affairs ministry, incurred an expenditure of about Rs 43 crore in nearly four financial years.

In a separate reply, the minister said that there are 1,380 restructuring cases in National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) under different stages.
In 2016, government constituted NCLT in order to help expediting adjudication matters under the companies law.