New Delhi : The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Commerce has asked the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) to undertake periodic third-party evaluations of the ease-of-doing-business reforms undertaken by the government recently.
Stating that such evaluation can assess the on-ground impact of such reforms on businesses, the Committee wanted the Department to also strengthen its regulatory compliance portal by integrating real-time grievance redressal and performance metrics. Such a measure will ensure effective implementation of compliance reforms at the ground level, it said.
The “Doing Business in India: The Way Forward” report presented to both Houses of the Parliament on August 7 acknowledges various initiatives the government has taken under the flag-ship programme of Ease of Doing Business.
However, it calls for rigorous efforts to ensure that redundant or overlapping licences are merged or removed so as to avoid duplicacy of work. The Committee notes that manufacturing facilities face distinct overlapping disruptions from separate departments conducting parallel inspections under independent laws, The Committee, therefore, recommends that DPIIT must transition from discretionary administrative checking to an automated Joint Site Inspection framework, shifting lower-risk sectors entirely toward third-party certifications and trust-based self-reporting regimes.
The panel acknowledged the notable progress achieved by the Reducing Compliance Burden (RCB) programme at the Central level, but said local-level compliances remain unaddressed in many States. Therefore, the Committee wanted the Department to develop sector-specific compliance roadmaps, in consultation with industry and State Governments, to address regulatory bottlenecks unique to different sectors. To institutionalize this integration at the lowest tier of governance, the Committee recommended the immediate expansion of the District Business Reform Action Plan (D-BRAP), ensuring that all State line-department approvals, business renewals and exit filings under the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC) migrate onto a single transactional dashboard linked directly to the National Single Window System (NSWS) platform with mandatory ‘deemed approval’. The NSWS system integrates approval processes across 32 Central Departments and 34 State Governments and provides access to over 686 central and 7,498 state approvals.
Key initiatives listed by the panel included Business Reform Action Plan (BRAP), Business-Ready assessment, Jan Vishwas, Reducing Compliance Burden (RCB) on Businesses and Citizens and National Single Window System (NSWS). It noted that under the RCB initiative, a four-pronged strategy focusing on Simplification, Digitalization, Decriminalization and the Elimination of Redundant Laws has successfully reduced over 47,000 compliances over the last five years. Further, under provisions of the landmark Jan Vishwas (Amendment of Provisions) Act decriminalized provisions of the Bill, 784 provisions across 79 Central Acts administered by 23 Ministries have been amended. Of these, 717 provisions have been decriminalized to promote Ease of Doing Business, while 67 provisions have been amended to facilitate Ease of Living.
