Sebi must frame policies on disclosure, conflict of interest for exit pollsters

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₹30 trillion. While some traders could have made a killing on both Monday and Tuesday, the bulk of market players, including many small investors, lost large sums because they bought at high prices on Monday and sold in a panic on Tuesday. Several opposition politicians have asked for an investigation into the circumstances, including a Joint Parliamentary Committee probe, to determine if the projections released on 3 June were due to honest errors on the part of exit pollsters or deliberate market manipulation.

Also read | Exit polls 2024: Track record could tell us whom to trust While political parties conduct their own assessments, they also hire the same exit poll experts to do the number-crunching for them. So it is quite possible that there may have been a conflict of interest for organisations conducting public exit polls. The Securities and Exchange Board of India has all the trade data at its disposal.

But this is an unusual situation. If Sebi finds that parties related to the exit pollsters (or politicians) profited from market movements, it may lack legal provisions to indict anybody. Regulations may not cover the concept of manipulating stock market prices by commenting on or making political projections.

This is a grey area in the law and needs to be addressed since market volatility is always associated with political events. In the case of the Lok Sabha election, this happened on a large scale. But market volatility is associated even with key assembly elections and also with Cabinet reshuffles.