New Delhi, May 22 -- India's new-age antitrust regulator turned 16 recently, bravely battling the symptoms and causes of its troublesome teens. The Competition Commission of India (CCI), the country's post-autarkic inheritor of a role once played by the Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices Commission, was born with a lag.

The CCI was created by the Competition Act of 2002, more than a decade after India opened its economy to global rivalry, but became fully operational as an antitrust watchdog only in 2009; it was bogged down by court cases against its founding.

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