Combining Digi locker & National Single Window to cut compliance burden

New Delhi, Dec 22 (Bureau) More than 25,000 compliances have been reduced by the Centre so far in its bid to promote ease of living and ease of doing business as part of a broader plan to focus initiatives towards reduce compliance burden on principles of simplicity and timely delivery of services. Addressing a national workshop on reducing compliance burden on Wednesday, Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal told stakeholders to focus on simplicity of processes, timely delivery of services and creating indigenous solutions to local problems, that technology must aid and abet initiatives to promote the ease of living and ease of doing business.

Speaking of the need to combine various services like the Digi locker and National Single Window System so that repetitive processes are rationalized and redundancies are eliminated when it comes to applying for approvals and permissions, Goyal also suggested the creation of a single identification number for businesses and individuals by merging the several identification numbers such as Adhaar, PAN, TAN etc so that delivery of services becomes smoother and faster. 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. The Minister stressed on feedback from all stakeholders while designing compliance requirements and use of crowdsourcing to find details of compliances that were proving to be cumbersome and work on rationalizing them. Speaking on breaking silos and enhancing synergies among government departments, the speakers including Commerce Secretary BVR Subrahmanyam discussed merging key business identity numbers into single ID and integration of state single window systems with Central ministries/departments. In the session on single sign-on for efficient delivery of citizen services, participants led by Ajay Prakash Sawhney, Secretary MeitY highlighted . integration of all citizen services at Central and state services on the National Single Sign-On. The workshop witnessed wide participation from states, central ministries, industry associations and industry representatives.