Registration of a company in India, usually takes five days, however, with a seemingly successful launch of a pilot project by the Ministry of Corporate Affairs, four companies were registered in a single day. Twenty eight company secretaries along with a couple of officials and executives from Infosys came together at the ministry's conference room in Shastri Bhawan, and made sure the companies were registered within a day.
As the system stabilises over the coming week, it is expected to register a company in a day as the government will move to centralised processing of incorporation proposals at a new centre in Manesar, instead of at the Registrar of Companies. The ministry of CA had shrunk the time taken to select the name, to one working day. The whole process was re-engineered and moved to an automated system. Not only does it take far less time, it has also reduced the number of rules from 39 to 26 steps. As a result, 14,000 applications were processed in one month. Seventy per cent of the applications are cleared in a day with the remaining 30 per cent given an additional time to resubmit. An official said, “But everyone gets to know within one working day if their application has been accepted or not. There is zero balance from Tuesdays-Fridays while there may be some additional work on Mondays due to applications filed on Fridays.”
The World Bank's Ease of Doing Business rankings estimated last year that, on an average, it took two-seven days to reserve the name for a company and another five days to complete the incorporation formalities. “If you were unlucky, it could take more than a year to get the name approved,” admitted an officer. The second phase will commence soon and turn the name selection exercise and incorporation process into a day-long affair. By the end of June, the ministry will release a new form which will further close the entire process into one.
