The SEBI (Investment Advisers) Regulations, 2013 govern anyone giving investment advice for consideration in India, with two registration categories (individual RIAs and non-individual (corporate) RIAs) each carrying its own net-worth, qualification, and certification requirements. Regulation 15 states the duty directly: an adviser "shall act in a fiduciary capacity" toward clients and must disclose conflicts of interest as they arise (confirm exact current text at sebi.gov.in), the same substance the SEC's Advisers Act reaches, but named in statute almost in those words rather than built from an interpretive release as the SEC did in 2019.
A distinctly Indian feature: SEBI pushes hard on separating advice from distribution, an IA is generally barred from also earning distribution commissions on the same client relationship, a stricter line than the historically blurrier US/UK "advice" vs "sales" boundary. Regulation 15A (2020 amendment) and its SEBI circular cap adviser fees under two alternative models per family, a fixed annual fee, or a percentage-of-assets-under-advice (AUA) fee, one model per family at a time, both capped, revised periodically by circular (Worked Example 5 and P11 build the breakeven arithmetic on illustrative figures; check the current cap amounts at sebi.gov.in).
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What other SEBI regimes sit alongside it?
Two sibling regimes complete India's intermediary map. SEBI (Portfolio Managers) Regulations, 2020 govern discretionary/non-discretionary portfolio management, with a minimum investment per client (₹50 lakh as of recent amendment: confirm current figure at sebi.gov.in) and a standardised performance-reporting template administered by the industry body APMI, a GIPS-adjacent comparability effort, independent of and not identical to GIPS, and a live example of the same problem answered a different way. SEBI (Research Analysts) Regulations, 2014 register a person who prepares or publishes research reports, makes buy, sell or hold recommendations, or gives price targets on securities, whether or not for a fee (check the current definition at sebi.gov.in). The absence of a compensation prong is the point, and it is what separates this definition from the investment adviser definition, which is expressly for consideration. A free public blog post carrying a price target can sit inside the research-analyst perimeter; the same post with no recommendation and no target usually does not. ES1.03 works that boundary case in full.