The academic research in the field of corporate governance has grown tremendously since Shleifer and Vishny (1997) published their path-breaking survey of literature on corporate governance. In India also, a good amount of research has been done. In this paper the literature on corporate governance in the Indian context has been reviewed. The research works of the corporate governance in the Indian context is classified into five categories, namely, corporate governance systems in India; ownership/capital structure and corporate governance; institutional investors and corporate governance; board characteristics and firm performance; and executive compensation. It is found that the researchers have consensus in answering certain issues such as the Indian corporate governance model moving towards the Anglo-American model. But there are many research issues like the effect of board size on the performance of the firm where they disagree. It is also observed that there are still plenty of research gaps available in the field of corporate governance in the Indian context.

The term corporate governance became a prominent research theme after the publication of Cadbury committee report in the UK in the early 1990s. This is evident from the fact that the number of research papers published in the peer-reviewed scholarly journals in the area of corporate governance has gone up from 641 in 1985-96 to 9717 in 1996-2006 (Balgobin, 2008). Unlike many other research areas in business, the corporate governance literature covers developing countries also, particularly those in Asia. Stijn and Fan (2002) reviewed the literature on corporate governance in Asia, excluding Japan. They classified the Asian corporate governance literature into four broad categories namely, ownership issues, corporate governance mechanisms, group affiliation and public and corporate governance. Their survey revealed that while enormous research work is being done in the area of corporate governance, most of them are based on the literature available on the western countries particularly, USA. In India also, the corporate governance movement gathered momentum after the publication of the report of CII on desirable code of corporate governance in 1997. But no attempt has been made to survey the literature of corporate governance in India. This paper attempts to review the literature on corporate governance in the Indian context since 1997. Though the focus is on the work done in the Indian context we consider the research work done in rest of the world for comparison purpose.