eBiz platform to provide over 200 services in 7 years: Govt

Seeking to further improve the ease of doing business, the government plans to expand the reach of eBiz project and provide more than 200 services through the platform in the next seven years.

The project envisages setting up a government-to-business (G2B) portal to serve as a one-stop shop for delivery of convenient and efficient services and addresses the needs of investors and businesses right from the inception through the entire life cycle of the business.

"The next seven years called expansion phase, the portal will be run on PPP basis through a business model approved for the project. In this phase, the project will be expanded to cover the whole country and to provide over 200 G2B services and other value added services by suitable private vendors," the Department of Industrial Policy & Promotion (DIPP) said.

During the years, it is planned to integrate additional 7 services related to central government departments, which include approval from Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB), annual filing of company returns and constitution of the firm-partnership/LLP company.

The other services to be integrated include application for environment clearance, approval for diversion of forest land for non-forest purposes under Section 2 of the Forest (Conservation) Act, 1980, issue of import export license of goods for restricted items and issuance of Entrepreneurs Memorandum part 1 and part 2.

A business-user today avails these services either from the portal of respective Ministry/Department or by physical submission of forms. After the integration of these services on eBiz portal, he/she can avail all these services 24x7 online end-to-end i.e. online submission of forms, attachments, payments, tracking of status and also obtain the license/permit from eBiz portal.

Through eBiz portal, a business user can fill the eForms online/offline, upload the attachments, make payment online and submit the forms for processing of the department. He will be provided with copy of challan, which he can save or print, acknowledgment of submission and tracking of status of the form besides receiving sms alerts on important notifications.

The certificate/clearance can be downloaded from eBiz.

"It is evident that the current process is time-consuming, expensive and cumbersome. As a result, India is constantly ranked poorly - 130 out of 189 - in starting a business indicator of World Bank's Doing Business 2015 ranking. The situation is a clear call to action, a need for a transformational initiative to take service delivery to the next level," DIPP said.