If you’ve attended a company’s Annual General Meeting from your living room sometime in the last five years, you’ve probably assumed this was a temporary COVID-era arrangement that would eventually go away. It hasn’t gone away. If anything, it’s about to become a permanent, structural feature of how Indian companies are run — and the story of how that happened tells you a lot about how Indian corporate regulation actually evolves: quietly, circular by circular, until one day Parliament simply writes down what everyone has been doing anyway.
A five-year experiment that never really ended
Go back to April 2020. The Ministry of Corporate Affairs, faced with a country under lockdown and thousands of companies staring down statutory deadlines for their AGMs, issued a general circular allowing companies to hold Annual General Meetings through video conferencing or “other audio-visual means” — VC/OAVM, in MCA shorthand. It was framed, explicitly, as a temporary relaxation. Nobody expected it to last.
Except it kept getting extended. Circular 20/2020 was followed by 02/2022, then 11/2022, then 09/2023, then 09/2024 — each one pushing the deadline a little further out, each one accompanied by the same boilerplate warning that this was not a permanent arrangement and companies still had to meet their statutory AGM deadlines regardless of the meeting format. By September 2025, something changed in tone. General Circular No. 03/2025, dated September 22, 2025, extended the facility again — but this time without an expiry date. Companies could hold AGMs and EGMs via VC or OAVM “until further orders.” No sunset clause. No “we’ll revisit this next year.” Just an open-ended continuation.
That’s a meaningfully different signal than a one-year extension. It tells you the Ministry had stopped treating virtual meetings as an emergency workaround and started treating them as the default mode of doing business.
The bill that puts it in black and white
Circulars, however, are administrative instruments. They can be withdrawn by the same authority that issued them, with a stroke of a pen. What actually locks virtual AGMs into the corporate law framework — rather than leaving them dependent on the Ministry’s continued goodwill — is the Corporate Laws (Amendment) Bill, 2026, introduced in the Lok Sabha on March 23, 2026, by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman.
This is genuinely one of the most extensive rewrites of the Companies Act, 2013 since it was originally enacted, and one of its provisions writes virtual and hybrid AGMs directly into the statute. Under the proposed change, companies would be permitted to hold their AGMs via video conferencing or in hybrid mode as a matter of ordinary legal right, not as a concession renewed every year by circular. The one meaningful guardrail carried over into the Bill is a requirement that companies still hold a physical AGM at least once every three years — a kind of “use it or lose it” clause designed to make sure shareholders retain some periodic right to show up in person, ask a question across a table, and look a chairman in the eye.
It’s worth being precise about where things stand as this is written. The Bill has been referred to a Joint Parliamentary Committee, which has been taking submissions from stakeholders including the Finance Ministry and the National Financial Reporting Authority, with its report expected around the Monsoon Session. So the “permanence” of virtual AGMs today rests on two legs: an indefinite MCA circular that is already in effect, and a pending legislative amendment that would make that permanence statutory rather than administrative. Both point in the same direction, but only one of them is currently law.
What this actually changes for shareholders
For an ordinary retail shareholder, the headline benefit is obvious: you no longer need to travel to a company’s registered office, sit through a physical meeting, or forgo attendance altogether because the AGM happens to be held in a city you don’t live in. A shareholder in Coimbatore can attend and vote at the AGM of a company headquartered in Mumbai without leaving home. For companies with a geographically scattered shareholder base — which, frankly, is most listed companies in India — this has quietly done more for shareholder participation than a decade of governance reform circulars ever managed.
But there’s a less obvious side to this too, and it cuts both ways. Virtual AGMs tend to be more tightly scripted. Chairmen and company secretaries who run these meetings have gotten very good at managing question time, batching shareholder queries, and moving through the agenda efficiently — which is good for meeting length but not always good for the kind of spontaneous, uncomfortable exchange that sometimes happens when an angry shareholder gets a live microphone in a packed hall. Anyone who has watched footage of contentious AGMs from the pre-pandemic years — heated exchanges over executive pay, related-party deals, or board appointments — knows that some of that friction served a real accountability function. Virtual formats, with their moderated chat boxes and time-boxed Q&A, dilute that friction. Whether that’s a net loss or simply a different, calmer form of accountability is genuinely debatable, and reasonable governance experts land on different sides of it.
There’s also the mandatory e-voting requirement that comes bundled with virtual meetings, which is arguably the single biggest practical upgrade for shareholders. E-voting was already common for major resolutions, but pairing it with virtual attendance means a shareholder can watch the meeting live, listen to management’s explanations, and cast an informed vote in the same sitting — rather than voting blind, days in advance, based only on the notice and explanatory statement.
The one thing that hasn’t changed
Every single circular MCA has issued on this subject — going all the way back to 2020 — has included some version of the same warning: virtual meeting permission does not extend statutory deadlines. Companies still have to hold their AGM within six months of the financial year-end (with the usual extension provisions), and failure to do so remains a compliance default regardless of whether the meeting was going to be held in person or over video call. That single caveat has survived five years, six circulars, and now a pending Act amendment completely untouched. It’s a useful reminder that “virtual” was always a change in format, never a change in obligation.
What to watch next
Keep an eye on the Joint Parliamentary Committee’s report, expected around the Monsoon Session of Parliament. If the relevant clause survives committee scrutiny in its current form, India will formally join a small group of jurisdictions that treat virtual general meetings as a statutory default rather than a pandemic-era exception — with a three-year physical-meeting backstop as the only concession to the old way of doing things. Until then, companies are operating on circular-based permission that, for the first time in this saga, doesn’t come with an expiry date stamped on it.
