Effatunnisa

https://doi.org/10.64823/ijter.2606001

The introduction of One Person Company (OPC) in Indian corporate law is a landmark which recognizes micro enterprises and individual entrepreneurial ventures to be made formal in a legal and regulated manner. In the past, company law was mostly focused on the idea of association which meant at least two persons had to get together to form a one private limited company. This was the requirement for private limited companies only; for public limited companies, as many as seven persons had to be involved. These old conditions for incorporation often left a single entrepreneur with no option but to open a sole proprietorship, a business structure which is unprotected in many aspects like limited liability and going concern (perpetual succession). The alternatives were that entrepreneurs brought in the so-called shareholders - even family members with a very small portion of shares - to fulfill legal requirements for a minimum number of members, because of this producing a fake plurality while the entity was, in fact, a single-owner enterprise. The Ministry of Corporate Affairs, acting on the advice of the Dr. J.J. Irani Expert Committee on Company Law constituted in 2005, after considering this issue, came up with the idea of OPC in the Companies Act, 2013. The purpose behind this legislative change was to enable proprietors to get into the organized corporate sector and Because of this they could avail benefits like institutional finance, top sector lending benefits as per the Reserve Bank of India, limited liability, and perpetual succession, all this even in the absence of bringing a second shareholder.That said, making a corporate entity whose whole ownership lies in one human being only, presents a structural paradox at a deep level.

https://doi.org/10.64823/ijter.2606003

These days, the intersection of corporate jurisprudence, macroeconomic policy, and gender has become a quintessential site of scholarship, unsettling the long-held presumption that legal rules regulating the corporate form are value-neutral. For many years, the core building blocks of corporate law ranging from the corporate separation of ownership and control to the foundational doctrine of limited liability have been examined with a narrow, neoclassical economic setup, one that has for long overlooked the gendered relations that influences the formation of capital, sharing of risk, and governing of the modern corporation. The last few decades Yet have seen the advent of an earnest corporate law scholarship committed to unraveling that alleged neutrality. This literature highlights the structural exclusion, institutional biases, and embedded network of sociopolitical relations that have historically underpinned differential access for men and women to corporate ownership and positions of power. Against this complex scenario of knowledge and praxis, the formalization of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) stands out as a critical frontier of women's economic emancipation. On a global level, female enterprise is considered not only as a matter of moral sphere for equality of gender, but also as a matter of macroeconomic survival, as it is directly linked to the goal of uninterrupted innovation, employment generation and systemic growth. But, the available pathways for women to formalize their business activities have long been far too restricted. Female entrepreneurs have traditionally been "pushed" into home-based solo entrepreneurship, which exposes them to full personal liability in business affairs, or "pulled" into complex, multi-member corporate arrangements, which require large amounts of capital, involve intricate regulator-entrepreneur interactions and imply the difficult task of finding co-founders.