India ranks one of the lowest when it comes to time taken to “Start a Business” – Infact, if you ask first time entrepreneurs on how their experience has been on starting a new business, they would in all probability discourage you to do it ever in your life. Yes, it’s that bad (and I am talking from my personal experience as well).
No wonder India ranks 132nd in the world when it comes to Doing Business in India, which covers all the aspects like getting credit, paying taxes, protecting investors, trading etc. . It takes about 29 days to start a business alone, and for that India ranked 166th out of 185 economies.
However, it looks like things are changing. According to a official press statement, Shri Sachin Pilot, Minister of Corporate Affairs said that the time taken to register a company has now been reduced to mere 48 hours (please note, that registering a company is just a subset of starting a business)
While registration of a company will take only 48 hours, Issuing of Director’s Identification Number (DIN) and name availability of company can now be done online within 24 hours. Both of these activities would earlier take close to a week or even more and now have been reduced to 3 days.
The minister has also announced that it has setup a committee under the Chairmanship of Shri M. Damodaran in August to conduct an in-depth study into the existing regulatory framework for doing business in India and to suggest a comprehensive policy framework for its improvement within 6 months.
Although, the announcement has been made and processes have been implemented, only time will tell if the company registration and DIN issuance will actually happen in the time promised. In India, generally the ground realities are actually different than what they supposed to be theoretically. Having said that, I am glad that we Government is taking some serious steps to ensure that the whole process become easier and even if they are partially successful, it will definitely spur entrepreneurship in India.