Government working on Jan Vishwas Bill 2.0 to reduce compliance burden: Mr Rajesh Kumar Singh, Secretary, DPIIT

The Government is working on Jan Vishwas Bill - 2.0, cutting across ministries and states to reduce the compliance burden. The industry must share feedback with DPIIT to make Jan Vishwas 2.0 better, said Mr Rajesh Kumar Singh, Secretary, Department for Promotion of Internal Trade and Investment (DPIIT), Ministry of Commerce and Industry, at the DPIIT - CII National Conference on Ease of Doing Business (EoDB) held in New Delhi on November 8, 2023.

“On the issue of reducing the compliance burden on businesses and citizens, we have completed Jan Vishwas 1. We are working on Jan Vishwas 2 and we look forward to specific suggestions from CII on what are the specific legal provisions cutting across different departments that need to be decriminalized,” added Mr Singh.

“We have set up a working group across ministries to look at those provisions, which can be decriminalized further in the next round. The bulk of the work on decriminalization now rests with the states,” noted the Secretary.

He added that the EoDB ranking for states has provided a tremendous impetus to the Business Reform Action Plan (BRAP) that is implemented annually by DPIIT to ensure that the reform momentum continues. The ranking framework is one of the critical levers for EoDB.

Besides EoDB, DPIIT is working on the cost of regulation and overall regulatory impact assessment. “We have to take steps to ensure that we do not regress in our rankings, which we improved at the state and the central level, when it comes to EoDB. A similar BRAP is being framed for the World Bank’s B-READY framework, which is to be implemented soon. When it comes to logistics, we need to take our ranking higher,” added Mr Singh.

Mr Sanjay Kumar Agarwal, Chairman, Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs (CBIC), Ministry of Finance, Government of India in his address at the session on Easing Paying Taxes & Customs’ Procedures said that the Government has already digitized and simplified customs clearances to great extent, expediting clearance of import and export goods. Customs are also carrying out national time release study and striving to further cut the time to get clearances.

He stressed that the Government is sensitive to the issues being faced by trade and industry and steps are being taken to address them. There are regional forums where businesses can also interact with the department and resolve their local issues.

The Conference was also addressed by state government officials, senior industry leaders and experts.

8 November 2023

New Delhi