What this dataset actually is

A Draft Red Herring Prospectus (DRHP) is the document a company files with SEBI before a mainboard IPO — financials, risk factors, use of proceeds, the works. SEBI reviews it, issues observations, and the company either amends and proceeds to "Approved," withdraws or has the filing returned, or sits "Under Process" while the review continues. The dataset behind this piece covers every mainboard DRHP in that live pipeline — filed, and still active in one of those three states — from December 2024 to June 2026: 232 companies, drawn from SEBI's own public-issues filings page and cross-referenced against the IPOPlatform.com DRHP tracker (a Chittorgarh Infotech platform), as compiled in mid-2026.

The volume gap: renewables filing at nearly five times the rate of oil and gas

Of the 232 companies in the pipeline, 19 are tagged to Power & Renewables and just 4 to Oil & Gas — the widest gap between any two sectors this blog's own beats regularly cover. The renewables list is overwhelmingly a solar and grid-hardware story: solar generation and EPC names including Sadbhav Futuretech, Cosmic PV Power, Rayzon Solar, Karamtara Engineering, Continuum Green Energy and Avaada Electro, alongside cable-and-wire manufacturers riding the same capex wave — Laser Power & Infra, Orient Cables, Premier Industrial Corporation, Oswal Cables and Tempsens Instruments among them. The oil and gas list, by contrast, is short enough to name in full: Steamhouse India Limited (Surat, filed July 2025, Approved), Bvishal Oil and Energy Limited (Ahmedabad, filed March 2026, Under Process), Punjab Carbonic Limited (Bathinda, filed March 2026, Under Process at the snapshot; SEBI issued its observation letter on 29 October 2026), and Advanced Sys-tek Limited (Vadodara, filed February 2025, Withdrawn).

None of India's large integrated oil and gas companies show up here, for a simple reason — ONGC, Indian Oil, BPCL, HPCL and Reliance are all already listed, so a live DRHP pipeline by construction only captures new and growth-stage entrants, not the sector's incumbents. Read that way, the 19-versus-4 gap isn't a verdict on the oil and gas industry's overall size; it's a signal about where new, IPO-track capital-market activity is concentrating among smaller and mid-cap companies specifically — and on that measure, renewables-adjacent manufacturing and generation is drawing far more of it than oil and gas exploration, refining-adjacent or midstream plays.

A second gap, in how filings actually resolve — read this one cautiously

Chemicals, Plastics & Materials has filed 15 DRHPs; 13 have been approved and zero withdrawn or returned — every filing that has actually been resolved cleared. Oil & Gas's four filings include one approval and one withdrawal, with two still pending — a 50 per cent clearance rate among the two that have actually resolved. That is a real difference in outcome, but the sample size makes it fragile: four filings is not enough to distinguish "oil and gas projects face harder scrutiny" from "one specific company, Advanced Sys-tek, had one specific problem." Chemicals' 15-filing, zero-withdrawal record is a sturdier data point precisely because the sample is larger; Oil & Gas's is not, and this piece is deliberately not drawing a causal conclusion from four data points.

The confidential route, and the sector nobody's headline expects

Five companies in this dataset — PhonePe, Zepto, Zetwerk, OYO and PGP Glass — carry blank revenue and profit figures because they used SEBI's confidential pre-filing route: a company can submit its DRHP without immediate public disclosure of the full document, then update and publicise it closer to the actual issue, keeping flexibility on market timing without tipping off competitors or the market too early. It's a real, named mechanism, not a data gap in this piece's own research.

And the sector that actually dominates the pipeline by sheer count isn't any single headline-grabbing theme. Engineering & Capital Goods has 28 live filings — more than Power & Renewables and Oil & Gas combined, and nearly double Metals & Steel (17) or Real Estate & Infrastructure (17), the next-largest sectors. Defence & Drones, despite heavy policy and media attention, has just 2 live filings; Media, Gaming & Entertainment has 4, three of them still under process. The capital-formation story the pipeline actually tells is industrial-capex-and-infrastructure-adjacent manufacturing broadly, not any one narrower sunrise-sector narrative.

What would fix this

• SEBI could publish sector-tagged aggregate approval and withdrawal statistics directly on its own filings page, rather than leaving researchers to reconstruct them by cross-referencing a third-party tracker against its raw filings list, as this piece had to.
• Sector regulators — MNRE for renewables, MoPNG for oil and gas — could track how much of their sector's investment activity is actually reaching public markets, as a real, checkable capital-formation indicator distinct from scheme-level announcements and installed-capacity targets.
• SEBI's full historical DRHP archive, which runs to roughly 2,132 records over about 20 years, should be made browsable in structured form, not just the live pipeline this piece covers — a point-in-time snapshot like this one can't show whether the renewables-over-oil-and-gas filing gap is a new pattern or a long-standing one.

These are proposals from this blog, not recommendations any agency has adopted.

Sources and caveats

About this article: Researched, written and edited by Umashankar Triplicane Dwarakanathan, with AI research assistance; every figure is meant to trace to the primary source cited. See the Editorial Policy for how sourcing, AI use and corrections work.