Millions of retail investors in India have been waiting for justice in the country’s biggest stock market scandal in two decades, but the investigation has been marred by controversy.
In 2023, a CBI officer probing the NSE co-location case was promoted to Deputy Inspector General, and his colleague received the Union Home Ministry Medal for Excellence in Investigation, despite court records showing the probe was incomplete and contradicted itself.
The Delhi High Court had already rebuked the CBI for filing a chargesheet that did not relate to the offenses in its own FIR, and the biggest allegations in the case, including bribery of regulators, hawala networks, and stolen government documents, had not been investigated.
Seven years have passed since the case began, and on April 29, 2026, a Delhi court issued summons to 44 accused in the NSE co-location case, which is a step forward, but it is actually a document that tells you who got away and why.
The supplementary chargesheet filed by the CBI on September 17, 2025, is not a document of prosecutorial ambition, but rather a document of institutional surrender, as it failed to investigate the relationships between exchange leadership, regulatory officials, and market participants that made the fraud possible.
It alleged that certain broker entities, including OPG Securities, had abused the exchange’s server architecture to gain illegal trading advantages, and that brokers had been secretly tipped off about server start times and had been allowed to connect to faster backup servers.
The CBI’s investigation has been criticized for its failure to examine the relationships between exchange leadership, regulatory officials, and market participants that made the fraud possible, and for its failure to charge any SEBI officials or pursue any regulatory failure.
SEBI’s investigation had uncovered emails between Chitra Ramkrishna, the head of NSE, and a person she described as a “Himalayan Baba” or “Yogi,” but the CBI has not investigated who the Yogi is or what he did with the information he received.
The emails showed that Ramkrishna had shared confidential NSE board papers, financial data, and strategic plans with the Yogi, which raises questions about the relationships between exchange leadership and market participants.
The NSE co-location scandal is a case where the investigation narrowed so dramatically that the most consequential questions were never answered, and the millions of ordinary Indians who put their savings into a market they believed was fair did not need a perfect investigation, but an honest one.
The omissions in the supplementary chargesheet are its most important content, and its silences are louder than its charges, as the forensic audit findings had already established the facts of the case, and the CBI’s chargesheet simply confirmed what was already known.
The CBI’s investigation has been a failure, and the millions of retail investors who were affected by the scam are still waiting for justice, as they had invested in a free trade environment they thought was fair.
They are also waiting for the regulators to take action, and for the marketing of such investment opportunities to be more transparent.
SEBI had investigated the case and had found evidence of wrongdoing, but the CBI’s investigation has not pursued the same leads, and the Income Tax Department had also found evidence of tax evasion by some of the accused.
The failure of the investigation has been criticized by many, and the regulators are under pressure to take action, as the case has raised questions about the relationships between exchange leadership, regulatory officials, and market participants, and the need for more transparency in the safe haven of investments.