History was made as the clock struck midnight on Friday, October 8, 2011 when Mumbai based IRIS Business Services Limited became India`s first mpany to file its annual returns with the Ministry of rporate Affairs (MCA) in XBRL.

As the mpany`s filing went through, it marked the launch of the next information revolution in India. It was a giant leap for India`s Ministry of rporate Affairs, who have been working to strengthen the disclosure framework to bring Indian reporting systems on par with best practices from around the world. With the launch of the XBRL filing platform, India joined the ranks of leading untries who have embraced XBRL to improve disclosure standards and improve rporate ernance.

XBRL or eXtensible Business reporting language is the next generation language for business reporting that is beginning to be used all over the world. In India, XBRL has been embraced earlier by the two leading stock exchanges, namely, the Bombay Stock exchange and the National Stock Exchange, by the capital markets regulator, the Securities Exchange Board of India and by the central bank, the Reserve Bank of India.

Having been at the forefront of XBRL rollout in India, we are delighted that we were the first to file on the MCA portal,`` says S. Swaminathan, Chief Executive, IRIS and Indiaa？？s most well known XBRL evangelist. ``After all, all the implementations, be they at BSE or NSE or SEBI or RBI are ours. The taxonomy too had been developed by us for the Institute of Chartered Acuntants. While the MCA platform has been developed by TCS, we were always available to them for any inputs they required,`` he added. ``Many of India`s biggest industry groups have turned to us to meet their XBRL needs,`` he said.

Acrding to the MCA circular, all listed mpanies and their subsidiaries, all firms with a turnover in excess of Rs 100 crore or those with a paid up capital of over Rs 5 crore are required to file in XBRL. It is expected that over 31,000 mpanies would have to file in XBRL. The ministry has also made it clear that the ruling will be extended to all mpanies from next year, based on the experience of this year. That will ver the approximately 9 lakh mpanies in India.