Watching India's Insolvency Reforms: A New Dataset of Insolvency Cases

This paper introduces a new dataset of orders passed by the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) in the insolvency cases under the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code or IBC. It builds this dataset to attempt an empirical analysis of the economic effect of the IBC and the performance of the judiciary under the IBC. There are 23 fields of information recorded in the dataset for each case. It analyses orders passed during the first six months of operationalisation of the provisions of the IBC to answer questions such as who are the initial users of the insolvency process under the IBC, what kind of evidence are they using to support their claims before the NCLT, what is the average time taken by the NCLT to dispose off insolvency cases, what is the outcome of the proceedings and is there variation between the benches. Within this limited dataset and within such a short time from the passing of the law, the paper finds behavioural shifts among credit market participants. As the insolvency cases increase, this data set will too increase in scope and size and will form the foundation to answer questions relating to the impact of the IBC and the overall functioning of the Indian bankruptcy regime.