The UNION BUDGET 2022 - EASE OF DOING BUSINESS & COMPLIANCE (An Overview)

Finance Minister Ms. Nirmala Sitharaman presented her fourth Union Budget. The Indian economy is estimated to expand 9.2 per cent in the fiscal year that ends in March, following a contraction of 7.3 per cent in the previous fiscal.

The Union Budget 2022 focuses on standardizing tax provisions and lowering overlapping compliance requirements under various laws.

Ms. Nirmala Sitharaman said in her Budget speech - “For the ‘Amrit Kaal’, the next phase of Ease of Doing Business (EODB 2.0) and Ease of Living will be launched. In our endeavour to improve productive efficiency of capital and human resources, we will follow the idea of trust-based governance.”

Key features pertaining to Ease of doing businesss in Union Budget 2022-23, which was submitted on Tuesday - 01 Feb 2022, were centred on -

(a) Imminent introduction of its second phase EODB 2.0. In recent years, more than 25,000 compliances were reduced and 1,486 Union laws were repealed.

(b) The new phase of 'Ease of Doing Business', will be guided by states' active participation, digitisation of manual processes and interventions, IT bridges connecting central and state-level systems, a single point of access for all citizen-centric services, and standardisation and removal of overlapping compliances which can also be blamed for a considerable percent of India's compliance concerns."

(c) In 2018, PARIVESH, a single-window site for all green clearances, was launched. It has helped to significantly reduce the time it takes to get clearances.

This portal's functionality will be enhanced in order to give information to applicants. Specific clearances will be provided based on the location of the units. The Finance Minister stated that this will allow for the submission of a single form for all four approvals, as well as the tracking of the process through the Centralized Processing Centre-Green (CPC-Green).

(d) It was also announced that 'One Nation, One Registration’ will be established, which will help do the registration anywhere in the country and that this would help ease of living and also ease of doing business.

(e) Ms. Nirmala Sitharaman also briefed about an online bill payment system for all central ministries in order to reduce the delay in payments and increased transparency..

"To reduce the delay in payment, a completely paperless online end-to-end ebill system is to be launched which will be used by all central ministries for their procurements," said Ms. Nirmala Sitharaman.