Piyush Goyal: 'Reducing compliance burden has multiplier effect on ease of doing trade'

Union Minister of Commerce and Industry Piyush Goyal on Tuesday said that efforts and measures taken to reduce the compliance burden encompassing simplification, elimination and decriminalisation of several laws can have a transformative impact and multiplier effect on the ease of doing business. The Union Minister said that a National Single Window System will enable reduction of compliances thereby improving ease of conducting business and ease of living.

While attending a conference on National Workshop On Reducing Compliance, Goyal said that the reduction of compliance burden is about trust in every business, person and citizen.

Compliance burden primarily works on complex systems and practices which have been making it tough for the normal people as well as business people to negotiate with, resulting in the discontentment among the masses and corporates too.

'Reduction of compliance has a multiplier effect on the ease of doing business'

"Reduction of compliances which include simplification of compliances, elimination of several compliances, decriminalisation of several laws. Collectively when you look at it, it can have a transformative impact and there is a multiplier effect on the ease of doing business," Goyal said.

The Minister added that during the last seven years, a number of such measures have been initiated owing to which there is an elevation in competitiveness, innovation and ease of doing business.

Secretary in the Department of Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT), Anurag Jain stated that all the reformations associated with the compliance burden were placed in four different buckets - simplification, rationalisation, digitisation and decriminalisation.

"By June 2021, almost 23,000 processes have been put in these four buckets. So 23,000 reforms have happened out of those 70,000 odd which were listed out (by a third party)," he said.

In a bid to minimise these burdens, every Ministry, Department and state were asked to conduct a comprehensive review of compliances under their purview to understand their relevance and rationale and undertake a complete process of re-engineering to eliminate burdensome compliance. 

Govt's bid to improve ease of living, doing business

The objective of the comprehensive exercise was to improve the ease of living and ease of doing business by simplifying, rationalising, digitalising and decriminalising government to business and citizen interfaces across every ministry or department and states or Union Territories. The initiative has been taken up by a four-pronged strategy, including the elimination of compliance burden, digitisation thus the creation of online interfaces and decriminalisation of certain laws.

As per the progress report on the reduction of compliance burden released by the minister, the government of India is focussed on decriminalisation of minor offences to remove the fear of prosecution for law-abiding corporates, and boosting investment. A total of 46 penal provisions of the Companies Act, 2013 have been decriminalised.

Referring to an example, the report stated that the Coal Ministry is in the process of reviewing 10 more rules to be considered for abolition under Coal Mines (Conservation and Development) Act, 1974 and Coal Mines (Conservation and Development) Rules, 1975, and the Department of Land Resources has also proposed to repeal the Land Acquisition (Mines) Act.

(With Inputs from PTI)

Image: Twitter/@PiyushGoyal