 "ICSI")
Frequent slowdowns and timeouts, and non-functional website are among some of the key issues flagged by the Institute of Company Secretaries (ICSI) to the Ministry of Corporate Affairs on the functioning of the version 3 of MCA 21 portal, ahead of the December 31 deadline for annual filings.
“There has been a good effort by the ministry on the version 3 of the portal and while many issues have been resolved, there are still some problems that the professionals are facing,” Dhananjay Shukla, president, ICSI said.
In a letter to the MCA, Shukla has highlighted that the portal was frequently slow, unresponsive, or completely inaccessible during peak filing hours of 3 pm to 8 pm.
“On numerous occasions, the MCA website remains largely non-functional; even the home page fails to load, rendering filings impossible. Where access is available, filings are disrupted by frequent system errors, timeouts, and crashes, resulting in failed or incomplete submissions,” ICSI said.
The process, it said, has been made time consuming because of additional requirements such as mandatory excel template uploads “significantly increasing preparation time and complexity without commensurate facilitation.”
Government sources said that though technical issues are being resolved, including in coordination with other government portals such as Bharat Kosh, several issues raised are due to lack of awareness.
“Version 3 is a very big endeavour and technical issues are getting looked into. Some of these go beyond MCA, but there needs to be more awareness on facilities such as pre-filled forms, editing of previous information now allowed, among others,” a senior government official said.
The latest version of MCA portal with final 38 new e-Forms was launched on January 14. In version 2, forms were required to be filled and uploaded in the portal, while in V3, the forms are supposed to be filled online. This was done to enable user convenience, including the ability to save a half-filled form and file it later.
The ICSI president said that the transition to an advanced digital landscape presents certain technical challenges, but they are collaborating with MCA to resolve ongoing technical issues and encouraging the professional fraternity to prioritise early filings and use offline utilities to ensure a smooth and timely compliance journey for India Inc.
The ICSI has told the MCA that even 15 days prior to the statutory due date, the MCA website has not been functioning properly, causing significant inconvenience to stakeholders.
The new version also includes a personalised “My Application” feature, which allows one to view all the forms filed by them till date along with the status of the forms, such as pending for DSC upload, under processing, pay fees, resubmission among others.
Despite the glitches in the version 3 of MCA portal, the total number of new companies registered in November went up by 11 per cent to 13,983, compared to the corresponding month last year, according to MCA’s latest monthly information bulletin.
New Limited Liability Partnerships (LLPs) for September 2025 to November 2025 was up 57 per cent compared to the corresponding period last year, The total LLPs in the country as of November 2025 was 442,404, which was 21.5 per cent more than last year’s figure.
The new registrations for Director Identification Numbers (DIN) went up 24 per cent in November 2025 to 39,406 compared to the same month last year.
