The Companies Act, 2013 has substituted the Companies Act, 1956 with most provisions becoming effective as on 1 April 2014. Ever since the Companies Act, 2013, was introduced, the Ministry of Corporate Affairs came out with over 100 Rules, Notifications, Circulars and Removal of Difficulties Orders, in order to remove anomalies, address genuine hardships, put to rest the concerns of the various stakeholders and also to improve ease of doing business. Further, MCA has introduced two Amendment Acts, first one, being the Companies (Amendment) Act, 2015 introduced on 29 May 2015 and the second Amendment Act, viz, the  Companies (Amendment) Act, 2017 which aims at a massive overhauling of the Companies Act, received the assent of the President of India on, as recently as 3 January 2018. MCA has notified 26 January 2018, as the date on which the Act shall come into force and only section 4 of the said Act pertaining to  name reservation and change of name by Companies shall come into force from this date. The remaining sections of the Act are not yet into force.

In the maze of all these changes, it is not surprising that most businesses and professionals have lost track of the updated version of the Companies Act, as it stands today. We have in this publication consolidated and updated the important provisions of the Companies Act, which in our view, will help them in taking proper corporate actions and decisions.

While the focus of this publication still is in respect of the most significant provisions from the perspective of the business and corporate world; for the ease of reference to our readers, we have in this publication, used a different font to include the amendments to the various provisions and also to include certain provisions, which were not notified during the time of our earlier publication, but which today, have been duly notified.

We have at the beginning introduced a Compliance Calendar for our readers covering the regular as well as a few important event based compliances. The procedural compliances, though, have not been discussed at length. It is necessary to ascertain the detailed regulations based on specific facts prior to taking action.

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