As the sound of conch shells and mandir bells rise across Kolkata for Kali Puja this year, a quieter, more symbolic ritual unfolds at Lyons Range the final rites of the Calcutta Stock Exchange (CSE). Once a formidable rival to the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE), this 117-year-old institution a financial monument of Eastern India has now vanished into history.
For the last time, its surviving members lighted diyas beneath the murti of Ma Lakshmi a tradition that endured for over a century and bid farewell to a financial giant that once defined Bengal’s commercial power. The Calcutta Stock Exchange no longer exists as a recognised bourse.
It did not die in a crash or a scandal this time but in silence.
Established in 1908, when Calcutta was the economic heart of the British Raj, the Calcutta Stock Exchange was more than just a marketplace. It was a symbol of Eastern India’s financial independence, a nerve centre where traders, industrialists, and brokers shaped the fortunes of the region’s great jute mills, tea estates, and shipping houses.
For decades, the name Lyons Range carried the same weight in Bengal that Dalal Street does in Mumbai today. The wooden trading floors once vibrated with energy; hand signals flew in the air; fortunes were made and lost between the morning bell and the evening’s closing gong.
But that rhythm stopped in April 2013, when SEBI, India’s market watchdog, suspended all trading on the CSE, citing non-compliance with modern regulatory norms. It was the beginning of the end.
When SEBI suspended trading, it wasn’t a surprise it was a sentence long in the making. The exchange had been struggling to modernise. Its governance structures were archaic, its technology lagged behind, and its volumes were a fraction of what NSE and BSE handled daily.
The 2013 suspension hit like a guillotine. SEBI accused the CSE of failing to adhere to core regulations including those on transparency, risk management, and investor protection.
The board of CSE did not take it lying down. It approached courts multiple times the Calcutta High Court and later the Supreme Court to challenge the ban. But legal battles only drained its coffers. Every year without trading meant lost revenues, lost brokers, and a shrinking workforce.
The final surrender came in December 2024, when the CSE board withdrew all pending cases and opted for a voluntary exit from the stock exchange business. CSE Chairman Deepankar Bose confirmed what most insiders had already feared.
“Approval has also been obtained from the shareholders vide EGM dated April 25, 2025, relating to the exit of the stock exchange business. Accordingly, CSE submitted the exit application to SEBI, which has, in turn, appointed a valuation agency,” he said.
Once SEBI signed off, CSE became a holding company. Its trading arm, CSE Capital Markets Pvt Ltd (CCMPL), continues to operate on the NSE and BSE, but the iconic Lyons Range trading floor is now gone reduced to a memory.
SEBI also approved the sale of CSE’s three-acre property on EM Bypass to the Srijan Group for ₹253 crore, marking the end of an asset once symbolic of financial stature.
How the empire collapsed
The CSE’s decline wasn’t a sudden collapse. It was a slow erosion, marked by missed opportunities, internal complacency, and external shocks.
In the early 2000s, when the financial world began migrating to online trading, CSE hesitated. The Dot Com boom was transforming global finance BSE and NSE invested heavily in real-time electronic systems, connecting traders across India. CSE remained stubbornly analogue, reliant on legacy processes and slow adaptation.
As one former official put it bluntly, “While the world went digital, we were still stamping slips.”
Then came 2001 the year that broke its back. The Ketan Parekh scam, one of India’s most notorious stock market manipulations, exposed the vulnerabilities in CSE’s systems. Parekh, a Bombay-based broker, exploited loopholes within the CSE to rig prices of select scrips infamously known as the K10 stocks fuelling an artificial boom that eventually imploded.
Investor confidence evaporated overnight. SEBI cracked down hard. Regional exchanges, already gasping for relevance, were suffocated under tighter scrutiny. CSE never recovered from that blow.
As NSE and BSE rose to dominate India’s capital markets, CSE’s volumes dwindled. Companies delisted, brokers migrated, and investors lost interest. Between 2005 and 2012, CSE’s daily turnover plunged by over 90 per cent.
Its reputation once a badge of Bengal’s entrepreneurial pride became a relic. With the exit decision finalised, CSE rolled out a Voluntary Retirement Scheme (VRS) for its staff a symbolic severance package for those who had given their lives to the institution.
A one-time payout of Rs 20.95 crore was distributed among employees, alongside an estimated annual saving of Rs 10 crore from reduced overheads. Some were kept on contract to complete compliance paperwork the bureaucratic afterlife of an exchange that no longer trades.
Veteran stockbroker Siddharth Thirani, who joined CSE in the 1980s, summed up the mood, “We began each day with a prayer to Ma Lakshmi before trading till April 2013, when SEBI suspended us. This Deepawali feels like a farewell not just to a stock exchange, but to our entire identity.”
Even as reports of its closure circulated, CSE officials denied the claims, telling NDTV that the exchange was still operational and awaiting regulatory nod. They called reports of its “final Deepawali” premature and incorrect, promising an official statement after the festival season.
But those close to the process knew the truth the end was already written, only awaiting SEBI’s formal stamp.
CSE’s demise isn’t an isolated tragedy. It is the funeral of India’s regional stock exchanges, once the beating heart of provincial commerce. From Madras to Ahmedabad, dozens of regional bourses have either merged or vanished over the past two decades, leaving Mumbai as the uncontested financial capital.
Kolkata’s last bastion of independent finance, the CSE, was more than a building or a board, it was a heritage of ambition. Its death marks not only the collapse of an institution but also the extinction of an era where finance had a distinctly regional soul.
On the night of October 20, as Kolkata’s skies shimmered with fireworks, the halls of the Calcutta Stock Exchange glowed for the last time. The diyas burned, but the trading screens remained dark.
No bells rang. No prices flashed. Only the memory of a once-great institution born in ambition, crippled by complacency, and buried under regulation lingers in the heart of Lyons Range. Chairman Bose’s words in the FY25 annual report now read like a quiet epitaph: “CSE has played an important role in India’s capital markets.” It did until India’s capital markets outgrew it.
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