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" 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 holds. Two statutes, six decades apart, produced two unrelated registration regimes that happen to share an identical English name.

It sits inside the ordinary net asset value formula that every unquoted-share valuation runs. Rule 11U's opening line does not scope itself to the virtual digital asset mechanism it was first spotted in: "For the purposes of this rule and rule 11UA," it applies across the whole of Rule 11UA.

That matters because Rule 11UA(1)(c)(b), the NAV formula used for every unquoted equity share valuation under Section 56(2)(x) and its predecessor Section 56(2)(viib), 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 exactly as it governs the VDA one. A jewellery-and-art sign-off inside a routine startup share valuation is the 1957 credential, doing work that predates the 2017 regime and has nothing to do with crypto.

A Section 247 valuer could not take that work even by choice. Annexure IV of theCompanies (Registered Valuers and Valuation) Rules, 2017 offers three asset classes: Land and Building, Plant and Machinery, and Securities or Financial Assets, the class examined in The SFA Asset Class Covers What an Entity Holds, Not Just What It Issues. Jewellery and works of art appear in none of them. This is not two credentials competing for one job. Only one of them is eligible at all.

Section 34AB read with Rule 8A of the Wealth-tax Rules, 1957 never organised itself around three asset classes. It registers valuers across ten categories, each with its own qualification test:

• Immovable property, and separately agricultural land
• Plantations, forests, and mines and quarries
• Stocks and shares and business assets
• Plant and machinery
• Jewellery, and separately works of art
• Life interest and reversionary interests

The qualification tests do not resemble each other. A jewellery valuer qualifies on 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. Nothing in that test touches a Chartered Accountant's syllabus.

That fragmented, category-by-category bar is what the 2005 Irani Committee, covered in Why India Carved Out a Separate Profession Just for Valuation, was reacting against when it asked for a single common standard instead. And the charging statute is now gone: the Wealth-tax Act has been out of substantive force since assessment year 2016-17, abolished by the Finance Act, 2015. The 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.

A statute that never adopted "valuer" terminology cannot collide with it. Three name a profession outright:

• FEMA. 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, covered in Cross-Border Share Pricing: Why FEMA Doesn't Recognise a Registered Valuer.
• The SAST Regulations. Regulation 8(2)(e) hands infrequently traded open offer pricing to "the acquirer and the manager to the open offer," the deal's own merchant banker. Regulation 8(16)'s override power names "an independent merchant banker... or an independent chartered accountant."
• Rule 11UA's own non-equity branch. Rule 11UA(1)(c)(c), for unquoted non-equity shares and securities, lets the assessee obtain a report from "a merchant banker or an accountant."

What makes the collision detectable is that both regimes are explicit. 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 the word inside ICDR reads off that one definition, 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. Unambiguously the 2017 credential.

Rule 11U(g) performs the identical drafting move for Rule 11UA and lands on the 1957 one. Two definitions clauses, each doing the same job, each perfectly clear on its own terms, pointing a reader holding the same three words to a different statute entirely.

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 on 1 February 2019. The proviso was never omitted. It is textually still there in 2026, seven years past the date its own condition stopped being true: a fallback with nothing left to fall back from.

Before relying on any valuation report, read the rule being satisfied and find its anchor. Do not read the word "registered" or "independent" attached to "valuer" and stop there, and do not read a professional's own letterhead as the answer.

A single individual can hold a Section 247 Securities or Financial Assets licence, ICAI membership, and SEBI merchant banker registration at once. Which of the three authorises a given signature depends entirely on which rule is in play that day. ICDR anchors the word to Section 247. Rule 11U anchors it to a tax statute that has not levied a rupee since 2015. FEMA does not use the word at all.

The word is a placeholder. The anchor is the credential. Only one of the two is worth checking.