Who Counts as a 'Valuer'? Six Statutes, Five Different Answers

Already established in Rule 11UA's 'Registered Valuer' Is a 1957 Credential, Not a 2017 One: Rule 11U(g) of the Income-tax Rules, 1962 defines "registered valuer" for the virtual digital asset valuation mechanism inside Rule 11UA by cross-reference to "section 34AB of the Wealth-tax Act, 1957 (27 of 1957) read with rule 8A of Wealth-tax Rules, 1957," not to Section 247 of the Companies Act, 2013, the credential this practice actually holds. Two statutes, six decades apart, produced two unrelated registration regimes that happen to share an identical English name.

Rule 11U's opening line does not scope itself to the VDA mechanism alone: "For the purposes of this rule and rule 11UA," it applies across the whole of Rule 11UA, not just the sub-rule Finance Act 2022 inserted for virtual digital assets. That matters because Rule 11UA(1)(c)(b), the net asset value formula used for every unquoted equity share valuation under Section 56(2)(x) and its predecessor Section 56(2)(viib), a formula decades older than any VDA rule, carries its own registered-valuer reference buried in component B: jewellery and artistic work are valued "on the basis of the valuation report obtained from a registered valuer." Rule 11U(g) governs that occurrence of the phrase exactly as it governs the VDA one.

The jewellery-and-art sign-off inside an entirely routine startup or private-company share valuation is not a Section 247 engagement either. It is the same 1957 credential, doing work that predates the 2017 regime by six decades and has nothing to do with crypto.

A Section 247 registered valuer could not pick this work up even by choice. Annexure IV of the Companies (Registered Valuers and Valuation) Rules, 2017 registers a valuer under exactly three asset classes: Land and Building, Plant and Machinery, and Securities or Financial Assets, the class already examined for its own scope questions in The SFA Asset Class Covers What an Entity Holds, Not Just What It Issues. Jewellery and works of art appear in none of the three. The overlap this piece is describing is not a case of two credentials competing for the same job; it is a case of only one of them being eligible to do it at all.

The Wealth-tax Act's registration framework was never built around three asset classes in the first place. Section 34AB read with Rule 8A of the Wealth-tax Rules, 1957 registers valuers across ten separate categories, each carrying its own qualification test: immovable property, agricultural land, plantations, forests, mines and quarries, stocks and shares and business assets, plant and machinery, jewellery, works of art, and life interest or reversionary interests. A jewellery valuer's qualifying test has nothing to do with a Chartered Accountant's or a Section 247 valuer's syllabus: at least five years running a jewellery business as a sole proprietor or partner, with roughly ₹15 lakh average turnover or ₹50,000 in valuation fees, the kind of sector-specific competency bar the 2005 Irani Committee's registered-valuer proposal, covered in Why India Carved Out a Separate Profession Just for Valuation, was reacting against when it asked for a single, common standard instead.

The category-by-category 1957 model is exactly the fragmented approach the 2017 regime was built to replace, and it never actually got replaced. It just stopped being the framework anyone thinks about, right up until Rule 11U(g) sends a reader back to it.

The irony sharpens further once the charging statute is checked: the Wealth-tax Act itself has been out of substantive force since assessment year 2016-17, abolished by the Finance Act, 2015. The tax it once levied is gone. The valuer-registration machinery built to administer that tax was never repealed alongside it, and Rule 11U(g) keeps a live cross-reference pointed at it a decade later, for a job, jewellery and art valuation, that has nothing to do with wealth tax at all anymore.

A third pattern sits alongside the two competing credentials: statutes that never adopted "valuer" terminology in the first place. Already covered in Cross-Border Share Pricing: Why FEMA Doesn't Recognise a Registered Valuer, Rule 21 of the FEMA (Non-Debt Instruments) Rules, 2019 names "a Chartered Accountant or a Merchant Banker registered with the Securities and Exchange Board of India or a practising Cost Accountant," full stop, for cross-border share pricing. Regulation 8(2)(e) of the SEBI (Substantial Acquisition of Shares and Takeovers) Regulations, 2011 hands infrequently traded open offer pricing to "the acquirer and the manager to the open offer," the deal's own merchant banker, not an independent valuer of any kind, and Regulation 8(16)'s separate override power names "an independent merchant banker... or an independent chartered accountant" when SEBI wants a second opinion.

Rule 11UA(1)(c)(c), the branch of the same income-tax rule that values unquoted non-equity shares and securities, lets the assessee obtain a report from "a merchant banker or an accountant," not a registered valuer of either vintage. None of these regimes ever migrated to Section 247's nomenclature, and because they never used the word "valuer" to begin with, none of them collides with it either.

What makes the two-credential collision detectable at all is that SEBI, unlike Rule 11U, states its anchor outright. Regulation 2(1) of the SEBI (ICDR) Regulations, 2018 defines "valuer" as "a person who is registered under section 247 of the Companies Act, 2013 and the relevant rules framed thereunder or as specified by the Board." Every occurrence of "valuer" inside the ICDR Regulations, including Regulation 165's infrequently traded pricing certificate and Regulation 166A's control-premium report, covered in A Listed Share Escapes the Registered Valuer Only When It Actually Trades, reads off that one definition, unambiguously the 2017 credential.

Rule 11U(g) performs the identical move for Rule 11UA, an explicit cross-reference rather than a floating term, and lands on the opposite answer: the 1957 credential. Two definitions clauses, each doing exactly the same drafting job, each perfectly clear on its own terms, and each pointing a reader holding the same three words, "registered," "independent," "valuer," to a different statute entirely.

One more variant sits between the two extremes: text that names the pre-2017 professionals and was simply never removed once the Section 247 regime went live. Rule 6 of the Companies (Compromises, Arrangements and Amalgamations) Rules, 2016, covered for its own "if any" conditionality in Merger Valuations: Conditional Under Company Law, Mandatory Under SEBI, names a registered valuer, then adds a proviso: "till the registration of persons as valuers is prescribed under section 247 of the Act, the valuation report shall be made by an independent merchant banker who is registered with the Securities and Exchange Board or an independent chartered accountant in practice having a minimum experience of ten years."

That registration was prescribed, and the Section 247 regime became fully operative, on 1 February 2019. The proviso was never omitted from the Rules afterward. It is textually still there in 2026, seven years past the date its own condition stopped being true, a merchant-banker-or-CA fallback with nothing left to fall back from.

"Valuer" is not a job title Indian law uses consistently. It is a placeholder each statute fills in separately, and checking which credential a given rule actually means turns out to matter more than checking whether the word "registered" or "independent" is attached to it. SEBI's ICDR Regulations anchor "valuer" explicitly to Section 247. Rule 11U anchors "registered valuer" explicitly to Section 34AB of a tax statute that has not levied a rupee of tax since 2015. FEMA, the SAST Regulations' infrequently traded branch, and Rule 11UA's own DCF branch skip the word altogether and name a Chartered Accountant, merchant banker, or Cost Accountant directly. And the Compromises and Arrangements Rules still carry, unedited, a fallback to the very professionals the 2017 reform was built to move past.

A single individual can hold a Section 247 Securities or Financial Assets licence, ICAI membership, and SEBI merchant banker registration all at once, and which of the three actually authorises a given signature depends entirely on which specific rule is being satisfied that day, not on anything printed on the individual's own letterhead.