National Single Window System India: To streamline business activities and ease business approvals in the country, the central government soft launched the National Single Window System last September. After a year, reviewing the process and implementation, Union Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal on Monday said that the government is planning to make Permanent Account Number (PAN) the unique identifier to enter the National Single Window System (NSWS). .
NSWS can be described as a one-stop platform for businessmen seeking regulatory approvals and services related to investments. The platform will help businesses identify and apply for necessary approvals to start or run their business.
The digital platform houses applications for various approvals from 26 central departments and 16 state governments. Businesses can apply for these approvals through NSWS.
Since its launch, 27 Central Government Departments and 19 States/UTs, including Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Goa, Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, have been integrated into the National Single Window System. By December 15, five more states and union territories, namely Haryana, Andaman and Nicobar, Tripura, Jharkhand and Arunachal Pradesh, will be integrated under it.
How does this work?
The NSWS system is currently in the beta testing phase and is considered as the first major step towards digitization of business.
- The platform will allow online filing and tracking of all applications and approvals.
- This will help investors to obtain approvals from various stakeholders without physically visiting various government offices.
- Currently, 13 different business IDs such as EPFO, ESIC, GSTN, TIN, TAN and PAN are being used in the system to apply for various government approvals.
- But the Center is planning to let businesses use the Permanent Account Number (PAN) as a unique identifier to apply on the platform for obtaining various clearances and approvals from central and state departments.
Minister’s Input
Tweeting about the relevance and importance of NSWS, Union Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal said: “We are beta testing the National Single Window System. We have received 76,000 applications in this testing phase.”
The minister added that: “Various ministries are working together to use one of the existing databases as a single-entry point, probably that will be PAN.”
Goyal said PAN entry will prevent duplication, help in auto-populating other application forms received on the system and speed up the approval process. With PAN, a lot of basic data about the company, its directors, addresses and a lot of general data is already available on the PAN database, he said.
He said technical glitches were as low as 514 and this means the system has an efficiency of 99.32 per cent. “So far 48,000 approvals have been received through this system. A large number of departments and states have been covered. We have received invaluable suggestions from the stakeholders,” Goyal said on Monday.
