Centre to brainstorm on reducing compliance burden of citizens, businesses

To improve 'Ease of Living' and 'Ease of doing business, the Centre has decided to further reduce the compliance burden on businesses and citizens, the Ministry of Commerce and Industry informed on Sunday.

As per the press release, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had interacted with Secretaries of various departments in September and discussed ways and means to reduce the compliance burden.

A meeting was also chaired by Secretary DPIIT, Anurag Jain with several stakeholders to discuss the way forward.

To take this mission forward, a National Workshop on the 'Next Phase of Reforms for Reducing Compliance Burden' is being organized on December 22, 2021. The outcomes of the breakout sessions of the workshop would be presented to Cabinet Secretary.

The workshop would see three breakout sessions which would be attended by secretaries of various ministries, representatives from various state governments and other senior officials.

The theme of the first session would be 'Breaking Silos and enhancing synergies among government departments. The session would focus on integration between Central ministries or departments and state single window systems and departments.

It will also discuss issuing of combined certificates for CIN, PAN, TAN, GST, LIN, Import-Export Code (IEC) etc, creation of Single business IDs to subsume multiple IDs and standardization and rationalization of information across Ministries/States/UTs, the statement said.

The second breakout Session would be themed 'National Single Sign-on for Efficient Delivery of Citizen Services. It would see deliberations on onboarding all citizen services by Central and State Government services under one roof - "National Citizen-Centric Portal" and the creation of a 'National Digital Profile' for all citizens that shall be used to pre-fill Government forms.

Citizen Benefits discovery and delivery would happen through the National Citizen-Centric portal. Enabling interoperability of the Digilocker facility for instant transfer of digitally self-attested documents would also be discussed.

These initiatives would lead to a citizen-centric approach and would help create a National Citizen-Centric Portal with all citizen services by Central and State Governments available under one roof, the release said.

Eventually, all government agencies would begin accepting digitally approved documents and there would be clarity of applicability of citizen welfare benefits to all, it said.

The third Breakout Session would be themed 'Effective Grievance Redressal'. The session would see discussions on the effectiveness of the Centralized Public Grievances Redress and Monitoring System (CPGRAMS) and other channels of grievance redressal.

It would also discuss an accountability-based mechanism for enhanced effectiveness of redressal quality and use of next-gen technologies ineffective grievance redressal.

Initiatives taken by States in building effective grievance redressal mechanisms would also be reviewed.

The outcome of the discussions would be initiatives to better the quality of grievance redressal Central and state governments and the creation of a grievance redressal system with reduced dependency on human behaviour.