On Wednesday, Union Minister of State for Commerce and Industry, Som Parkash said that the government of both state and Union have simplified, rationalized, digitalized, and decriminalized more than 33,000 compliances to promote the ease of doing business. The minister informed the parliament in response to a question regarding whether the government is aware of the state of smaller and medium-sized businesses and whether they are compelled to shut down because of monotonous compliances.
According to the MoS, the government of India both state and UT have been working to decrease the burden of compliances on the businesses. The exercise aims to boost the ease of doing business by simplifying, rationalizing, decriminalizing, and digitizing government-to-business interfaces.
Moreover, an agency of the government for industrial growth Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) has noted down during a workshop on the topic of reducing the compliance burden that around 22,000 compliances were reduced, almost 13,000 compliances were simplified and estimated 1200 were digitized till September last year. Further, 103 offenses were decriminalized and 327 unessential laws were removed.
Although, there are still 26,134 clauses existing out of 69,233 unique compliances that regulate doing business in India and are enough to put entrepreneurs in jail for non-compliance with business laws, stayed in a report named Jailed for Doing Business presented by TeamLease RegTech and Delhi-based independent think tank Observer Research Foundation in February 2022. The report further added that an average MSME having more than 150 employees faces 500 to 900 compliances in a single year that cost around Rs 12 to 18 lakhs.
In World Bank’s Doing Business rankings, India was ranked 63 in 2020 while it ranked 142 in 2015. However, the annual report was discontinued last year.
According to the Business Reforms Action Plan 2020, which assesses the state and UTs based on the implementation of a variety of reform parameters for the improvement of doing businesses, Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Haryana, Karnataka, Punjab, Tamil Nadu, and Telangana are announced as the top achievers of this year in June.
The action plan consists of 301 reform points including 15 regulatory areas like access to information, single window system, labor, environment, land administration & transfer of land and property, utility permits, and many more. The commerce ministry informed that 118 new reforms had been added to further extend the reform process and sectoral reforms with 72 action points across 9 sectors including trade license, healthcare, legal metrology, cinema halls, hospitality, fire NOC, telecom, movie shooting, and tourism are introduced to expand the scope of the reform process.
