Dismayed by the lack of enthusiasm among the industry over the national single window system and the industrial land bank, commerce and industry minister Piyush Goyal on Thursday said that he is almost inclined to discontinue these business-friendly measures.
“I am once again urging you, hopefully for the last time, to engage with the national single window and try to get licences and approvals and provide feedback. It seems as if the industry does not have an interest in either the national single window or the industrial land bank,” the minister said at a conference on ease of doing business organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT).
“I am spending a lot of money on it, and I have come to a stage where I am almost inclined to abort the entire idea.”
The government launched the single window system for investors and businesses in September 2021 to integrate the existing clearance systems of central government departments and eventually states.
At present 34 ministries have been onboarded on the system and the portal can now facilitate more than 659 approvals.
The government developed the India Industrial Land Bank (IILB) as an open web portal to assimilate information on industrial infrastructure of clusters, parks, nodes and zones across the country. The portal has information on approximately 3,800 industrial parks mapped across 470,000 hectares of area with GIS layers on raw material availability, nodal points of connectivity, internal utilities and natural terrain including forest and drainage. It was launched in September 2020.
“We created our national land bank. It needs some more support from the states also, but we will stop putting in more effort and money in it if we realise there is hardly any traction, hardly any interest in industry. There is very little interest amongst stakeholders to tell us whether we are even on the right track.”
He said 20 smart cities are being developed all over the country that will give the industry a lot of land on plug and play basis but industry has to give feedback on what it wants. Four cities are already operational and four are under implementation. The 12 more that were recently approved by the cabinet are at the stage of preparation of Detailed Project Report (DPR).
The minister also invited the inputs of the industry on the Jan Vishwas Bill 2.0 which will take forward its efforts to reduce compliances and decriminalise 300 more laws.
At the conference, the minister also launched the CII Ease of Doing Business (EoDB) and Regulatory Affairs portal for getting insights into India’s business environment and to receive and track suggestions for improvement.