There is an urgent need to increase the level of self-governance, as the cost of compliance and non-compliance has gone up substantially as people prefer to fight it out than reach a settlement, a senior SEBI official said on Wednesday.

"The cost of compliance has increased substantially of late and so is the cost and the instances of the non-compliance and resultant increase in the number of litigations. So the only way out, I feel, is to increase self-governance," VS Sundaresan, an executive director with the market watchdog SEBI, said here.