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Can the Employer Provide an Allowance Instead?

The Rules also permit a monetary allowance instead of a physical creche facility. This should be structured as an allowance and not a reimbursement, meaning employees should not be required to submit bills or proof of actual creche expenses. The statutory minimum is ₹500 per month per child.

Who Must Receive the Benefit?

At a minimum, the benefit must be extended to

• Women employees,
• Widowers and
• Male single parents.

Employers may extend it to other employees as well, but limiting the benefit only to female employees would not meet the minimum requirement under the Rules.

Is Employee Consent Required?

Yes. The Rules require majority employee agreement to the creche or allowance arrangement. Employers should circulate a creche policy, obtain acknowledgments and maintain records of acceptance. Unanimous consent is not necessary.

Can Remote Employees be Excluded?

The Rules do not expressly exclude remote employees. However, if the benefit is linked to a workplace-based creche, employers may have a reasonable basis to limit it to onsite or hybrid employees, if the policy clearly states this.

Conclusion:

The creche requirement places a clear responsibility on employers to provide a compliant facility or permitted monetary alternative. Policies should cover location, eligibility, consent, payment structure and any limits for remote employees.

2. Fast-Track Mergers and Demergers
   • Amended Rule 25 of the Compromises Rules, notified in September 2025, extended the Section 233 route well beyond small companies.
   • Each company files a declaration of solvency, and the scheme needs approval from members and creditors as required.
3. Tighter Merger Control
   • Since September 2024, transactions valued above INR 2,000 crore require CCI approval where the target has substantial business operations in India.
   • Relief remains available through the de minimis exemption, intra-group exemptions, and the Green Channel route where applicable.
4. Acquisition Financing
   • The RBI's Credit Facilities Amendment Directions, 2026, effective from 1 July 2026, allow banks to finance certain acquisitions of control by Indian non-financial companies.
   • Acquirers often merge the borrowing SPV into the target so interest is serviced from operating cash flows.

These exceptions exist precisely because forcing immediate conversion of every foreign exchange receipt would be commercially disruptive.

Outside these carve-outs, however, the default rule under the Foreign Exchange Management (Realisation, Repatriation and Surrender of Foreign Exchange) Regulations, 2015 still applies. Amounts due to a resident must be realised and, unless specifically exempted, repatriated within the prescribed period.

Understanding the distinction for both Capital as well as Current Account Transactions

The realisation-repatriation gap applies with equal force to both capital and current account transactions. Whether the money at stake is an export invoice falling due on the current account, or a disinvestment falling due on the capital account, FEMA draws no distinction on account of the transaction's nature — only on whether the two-step discipline of realisation followed by repatriation has actually been observed.

The lifecycle plays out identically across both:

• The trigger event is where the claim to money crystallises. For example, an export invoice falling due on the current account, or a sale, redemption or disinvestment of an overseas holding on the capital account.
• Realisation happens when the foreign buyer, entity or counterparty actually pays out what is owed, i.e., the invoice value, or the sale proceeds and investment income.
• Repatriation is the separate, subsequent step of bringing those proceeds into India. The Overseas Investment framework specifically permits exceptions to repatriation, such as re-investment abroad, subject to specific applicable conditions.

So what, precisely, is the dividing line?

Realisation is about the counterparty's obligation being discharged — money has actually changed hands. Repatriation is about what the resident then does with it — surrendering it to an Authorised Dealer, converting it to rupees, or crediting it to a permitted account in India.

A transaction can be realised without being repatriated (money received and simply parked abroad, whether the same is allowed or not), but it cannot be repatriated without first being realised.

Inherited foreign assets: A partial exception

Where a resident inherits foreign bank balances, securities or property from a person resident outside India, FEMA doesn't force an immediate unwind. Certain foreign currency holdings may continue to be retained, subject to conditions often through an RFC account.

What doesn't automatically follow, though, is a repatriation holiday: income earned on inherited assets, and proceeds on their eventual sale, generally still fall back into the realisation-repatriation framework unless a specific permission applies.

The compliance tail

Realization and Repatriation may form part of the same transaction, but FEMA treats them as distinct obligations. For export, the distinction is often less visible because proceeds are ordinarily received through Indian Banking Channels, nevertheless, Export proceeds must nevertheless be realised and repatriated within the prescribed period. For exports on or after 1 October 2026, this is 9 months from the date of export, or 12 months where the export is invoiced and/or settled in INR, under Reg. 5(1) of the FEMA (Export and Import of Goods and Services) Regulations, 2026, as amended on 22 September 2026. The AD bank can extend this for sufficient and reasonable cause.

For overseas investments, the separation is more evident. A dividend, disinvestment consideration or other entitlement would be considered realized when due, however as per the Overseas Framework, such dues are required to be repatriated to India within 90 days of becoming due.

Similarly, Resident Individual are required to repatriate any foreign funds earned or parked abroad within 180 days, unless this funds are reinvested in FEMA permissible instruments

Model building has become largely templated. Firms maintain standardised DCF and comparable company models where the mechanics are pre-built and only the inputs change. Sensitivity tables, scenario toggles, and output summaries generate themselves.

Document processing has improved sharply. Financial statements, agreements, and tax orders can be read and structured automatically, reducing the manual data entry that used to consume a meaningful share of an engagement's budget.

Report drafting has followed. Standard sections covering methodology descriptions, limiting conditions, and industry overviews are increasingly assembled from libraries rather than written from scratch each time.

2. Where Automation Genuinely Helps

The gains are real, and they concentrate in a few areas.

Speed is the obvious one. Work that previously took a week can often be completed in a day.

Consistency improves. A firm using standardised models applies the same structure, the same conventions, and the same checks across every engagement. This matters for quality control and for peer review.

Error rates fall. Formula errors, broken links, and transcription mistakes are a genuine risk in manually built spreadsheets.

Coverage widens. When screening comparables is cheap, a valuer can consider a wider peer set and test more scenarios rather than settling for the first workable option.

3. Where It Does Not Help

The limitations are equally clear, and they cluster around judgement.

Selecting comparables is the most obvious example. A screening tool can return thirty companies matching an industry code and a revenue band. Deciding which five are genuinely comparable requires understanding the subject company's business model, customer concentration, geographic exposure, and stage of maturity.

Normalisation adjustments cannot be automated in any meaningful sense. Deciding whether promoter remuneration is above market, whether a related party rental is at arm's length, or whether a bad debt write off is genuinely one off requires knowledge of the business and its context that no dataset contains.

Assessing management projections is similarly resistant. A model will discount whatever cash flows are entered into it. Judging whether those projections are achievable, whether the revenue assumptions align with market reality, and whether the margin expansion is credible is the actual valuation work.

Company specific risk assessment is judgement throughout. Key person dependence, customer concentration, regulatory exposure, and litigation risk all affect value, and none of them can be read off a screen.

4. The Specific Problem with Unlisted Companies

For unlisted Indian companies, the constraints are sharper than the general case suggests.

The available data is thin. There are no observable market prices, comparable transaction data is often unavailable, and where listed peers exist, they typically differ substantially in size and structure. Automation is most powerful where data is abundant, and here it is not.

Financial information quality is variable. Reported financials in closely held companies are shaped by adjustments and ownership arrangements, which means the inputs feeding any automated process require manual assessment before they can be relied upon.

The adjustments that matter most are qualitative. Discounts for lack of marketability, control premiums, and key person risk are exactly the areas where judgement dominates and where a mechanically generated output carries the least weight.

5. Conclusion

Technology has genuinely improved valuation work by removing a substantial amount of mechanical effort and reducing avoidable error. What it has not done is reduce the need for judgement, and in some respects it has increased it. When the mechanics become effortless, the quality of a valuation rests even more heavily on the assumptions selected and the reasoning applied.

For work on unlisted Indian companies, where data is limited and adjustments are largely qualitative, the professional contribution remains the substance of the engagement rather than an overlay on top of it.