Nov. 9 (Bloomberg) -- India’s stock market regulator eased rules for stock listings and earnings reports by the nation’s small and medium-sized companies, Chairman C.B. Bhave said.

The companies are exempt from eligibility standards that bigger firms must meet to make initial share sales, Bhave said today at a briefing in Mumbai, following a meeting of the Securities and Exchange Board of India’s directors. Small companies can list their shares on the country’s existing exchanges and there’s no plan to set up a separate bourse for them, he said. They can report half-yearly earnings instead of announcing every quarter as bigger firms do, he said.

Banks that arrange share sales by small and medium-sized companies “will bear the responsibility for market-making for a minimum period of three years” and “will be required to ensure that the issue is 100 percent underwritten,” the regulator said in an e-mailed statement. “Only a minimum percentage, 15 percent of the issue size, will be mandated to be compulsorily underwritten by the merchant banker itself.”

Separately, the Securities and Exchange Board, or SEBI, made it mandatory for all companies listed on stock exchanges to disclose audited financial results within 45 days after the end of a quarter. The regulator also reduced the time limit for the release of audited annual results to 60 days after the end of the financial year from 90 days earlier.

The Securities and Exchange Board also allowed an auction- based book-building method for shares sales that let investors bid at any level above a pre-set minimum price and the shares to be allotted at different prices, according to the statement.

The regulator has completed a financial review of 47 of the 51 companies that are traded on the nation’s biggest two bourses, the Bombay Stock Exchange and the National Stock Exchange, Bhave said. The SEBI found nothing that causes concern in the review, which was undertaken after Satyam Computer Services Ltd. came under investigation this year for financial irregularities.

To contact the reporters on this story: Rajhkumar K Shaaw in Mumbai at rshaaw@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: November 9, 2009 09:33 EST