The Minister of Commerce and Industry, Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution and Textiles, Piyush Goyal today urged political leadership, bureaucracy and industry leadership to focus their initiatives to reduce compliance burden, on principles of simplicity and timely delivery of services.
He was addressing the valedictory session of the ‘National Workshop on the next phase of reforms to reduce Compliance Burden’ in New Delhi today. It may be noted that more than 25,000 compliances have been reduced in the previous exercise implemented by the centre to reduce compliance burden and to promote Ease of Living and Ease of Doing Business.
Touching upon the infinite possibilities of technology, Goyal said that technology must aid and abet initiatives to promote the Ease of Living and Ease of doing business and should not further complicate the system of compliances. He spoke of the need to develop indigenous solutions to problems that India faced.
The Minister asked policy makers to consider the wide disparity in income, literacy level and the gaps in infrastructure, especially connectivity, while planning the delivery of services, especially if technology is involved.
Speaking of the need to make monitoring mechanisms more robust, Goyal said that monitoring of policies and programs must not become more cumbersome than the underlying problem that the initiatives were seeking to solve.
Goyal opined that feedback from all stakeholders, especially users, had to be taken into account while designing compliance requirements and that ground realities must always be taken into consideration. He urged policymakers to use crowdsourcing to find out details of the compliances that were proving to be cumbersome and work on rationalizing them.
He spoke of the need to combine various services like the Digi locker and National Single Window System so that repetitive processes are rationalized, gaps are bridged and redundancies are eliminated when it comes to applying for approvals and permissions. He called for the creation of a single identification number for businesses and individuals by merging the several identification numbers that exist presently, such as Adhaar, PAN, TAN etc so that delivery of services becomes smoother and faster.
Speaking of the need to decriminalize Legal Metrology, the Minister urged industry participants to keep seeking reforms and improvements in processes and procedures. He also called for promotion of self- attestation, self- certification and self- regulation. He added that it is high time that compliance systems were built on trusting the integrity of the citizens.
Calling for big ticket reforms, the Minister said that the new structures must not shackle people. Underscoring the need to address information asymmetry among stakeholders, Goyal called for, consolidation of the gains made so far in reducing compliance burden.
The day-long Workshop was divided into three parallel breakout sessions. The theme of the first was “Breaking Silos and Enhancing Synergies among Government Departments”. The second was based on the theme of “National Single Sign-on for Efficient Delivery of Citizen Services” while the third Breakout Session is themed ‘Effective Grievance Redressal’.
Speaking at the inauguration of the Workshop, Anurag Jain, Secretary, Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) said that grievance redressal mechanisms must be humane and sensitive. He opined that in cases where grievances cannot be fully resolved due to rules and procedural aspects, the same must be conveyed to the complainant sensitively. Government departments could handle the genuine grievances with a human face, he added.
The Workshop witnessed wide participation from across Central Ministries and States/UTs. The ideas that took shape during the deliberations at the conference were presented to Piyush Goyal and Cabinet Secretary, Rajiv Gauba.
