India gets new market regulator in Tuhin Kanta Pandey; what are his views on Crypto?

Senior bureaucrat Tuhin Kanta Pandey, finance and revenue secretary, was appointed as the 11th chairman of the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) on Friday. Pandey’s appointment comes in the wake of Indian government identifying cryptocurrencies as “crypto assets” in their latest Finance Bill and also treating any undisclosed crypto assets as “undisclosed income.”

As Finance Secretary and Secretary of the Department of Revenue, Pandey was instrumental in drafting the Finance Bill 2025 under the regime of union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman. Now, 60-year-old Pandey has replaced former SEBI chairman Madhabi Puri Buch, to join helm of affairs as India’s market regulator.

Born in 1965 in Odisha, Pandey completed his master’s in economics from Panjab University, Chandigarh, followed by an MBA from the University of Birmingham (UK). Later he joined the coveted Indian administrative services (IAS)and started working as a collector and district magistrate of Sambalpur district. He was later also deputed to the regional office of the United Nations Industrial Development Organization.

During the recent union budget 2025, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman introduced the Finance Bill where cryptocurrencies will be defined as “crypto-asset being a digital representation of value that relies on a cryptographically secured distributed ledger or a similar technology to validate and secure transactions” with effect from April 1, 2026. The bill also had proposals to make it mandatory for all Indian citizens to report any crypto earnings to the government.

Later in a press conference, Pandey explained the latest tweaks in the Finance Bill to include cryptocurrencies. As per a report in Business Standard , Pandey said that India has been part of a list of 52 relevant jurisdictions for the purpose of Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework (CARF), making it obligatory to furnish information of crypto assets.