I tried starting a manufacturing unit in India (2020)
superr.in
superr.in
One of the worst business-decisions of my life. The amount of red tape, stupid rules, corruption, signatures, stamps, showing up physically in a certain office etc etc... Mindblowing.
I will not tire you with all the details, but to this day, Indian tax authorities still hold money hostage, that they agree my Indian company is owed (GST refunds). But all attempts to actually get the money back falls on deaf ears. We have sent experts to the relevant tax offices etc, but the ONLY guy who can handle it is never there, refuses to deal with it, then says we need to go somewhere else - where we are sent back etc etc. Sent around in circles, basically - with everybody recognizing the money is in fact owed...
I will never do business in India again. Happy to work with Indian developers (I still do), but they will get paid as freelancers and deal with the red tape on their end.
It seems that whenever there's red tape, there's a business opportunity in paving over it and providing a sane interface on top of it instead.
Before this hiring internationally was a pure nightmare to the point that we simply didn’t accept international remote developers.
Thanks Remote!
In my experience, it added just enough of a layer of obscuration to perpetuate a caste system, similar to how full time temps and vendors are currently treated in tech. US FTE employees had full HR support while Indian subcontractors had really poor HR/payroll/benefits resources from Remote. YMMV
They have a much better understanding of my local laws, tax systems etc than the US-based HR and Payroll departments at companies I’ve worked for in the past.
They're hiring freelancers as employees, and take care of all the invoicing and tax stuff for them. The freelancers can focus on their craft as if they were employees, with no loss in autonomy.
5 years later, I'm yet to receive the refunds. First, they said that they were authorized to only sanction refunds for exporters of physical goods and then they said that this is handled by the State government, who said that it was handled by the Central. Finally Central accepted that they are in-charge of the refund, but by then COVID happened and I could not follow up for 2 years. In May, when I tried to claim the refund again, they said that this refund pertains to 2016 and it's difficult to "reopen" the accounts for that year and that's handled by yet another department. So, they have written to them to ask for the process. No replies after two emails. Story continues...
I had to apply for Foreign Export of Services Certificate as well which turned out to be the PAN number.
They also made it impossible for services exporters to claim GST back on business expenses.
India’s legal systems and the enforcement of laws are one of the biggest drags on a country with immense potential.
Do not set up a legal entity in India. It will become a never-ending void where money and time go to die. The bureaucracy is hilariously inept and bloated, and if you are not willing to pay the bribes or for some entity to navigate the systemic corruption on your behalf, you will end up in OP's situation.
Source: hired many Indian developers in recent years for a SV startup
It's very easy to read these requirements and agree that there are natural resources that (a) you don't want exploited and (b) want preserved, so all of these hurdles are necessary. But the timeline involved and the MULTIPLE bribes really drives home the fact that reforms are needed.
Edit: sorry, one person openly asked for a bribe, the Panchayat. I would like to understand more about this. Do they just ask for an amount?
Baksheesh, whereby people expect a tip ahead of time if you want decent service, is quite common in India and is essentially another form of corruption, especially when practiced by police, bureaucrats, etc.
But accepting a gift to do your actual job, how could that be illegal, hmmmm?
In short it is a way to avoid getting caught.
Driving license is another. You'll see tens of touts in and around the govt office; you pay about INR 2-3K and get your drivers' license. Again, a tout/agent will handle it for you end to end.
Both are very well oiled machine; money goes all the way up to politicians. Getting a posting in those offices in turn requires millions of rupees of bribe, besides influence, caste angle etc.,
Speaking from personal experience.
* Trade license (renewable each year)
* Shops and establishment license Weights and measures calibration (needs to be done each year)
* To get electrical connection or to get additional capacity (Rs.100,000/KW in Bengaluru)
* Export / Import - at the ports to various officials no matter how clear your papers are
* Police clearance (for restaurants)
* Health inspector (from time to time)
* Food and Safety license (needs to be renewed periodically) Labour inspector etc
* Periodic visits from panchayat/municpality/police etc where they will demand money or take stuff for free or at huge discounts
India is a cesspit of corruption
The phone number of the constable who deployed the lock was written on the lock itself. So I called it. The constable and a sub-inspector promptly showed up within 15 minutes. They spoke very politely when I asked why I was the only one being fined. They were even apologetic as they were promptly issuing me a ticket for Rs.500. I had looked up the fine before they arrived and Rs.500 was correct. I paid the fine, they removed the lock and I drove away. They were deploying that lock on another vehicle on the same lane. No bribe whatsoever. Overall, I was surprised/delighted/dazed by the whole experience.
I am curious to know how the Stripe Atlas-like services from razorpay.com and clear.in have worked out for folks here in dealing with govt-facing work?
Also, political parties are mostly funded by bribery, and rely on literally buying the votes of villagers to maintain power. Any political entity with the power to actually tackle corruption would have little incentive to do so.
Not only the ease of doing business is non-existent but also the entire running the company's operations is exhaustive and riddled with inconsistencies regulations. Plus, the amount of reporting required to stay compliant is never ending.
Every month you will have to file for multiple GST reports, then file quarterly GST reports again to reconcile. On the other hand, file for quarterly advance tax, then finally file for annual income tax. To top it of, GST rules changes so frequently that the entire book keeping process becomes complex & convoluted.
You will end up spending more time in keeping all the things in check with the regulation instead of spending time on growing the business itself.
- Have a local point of contact. If you are not Indian yourself or at least of Indian Origin, you will need to have a good local contact ideally your lead tech. who can be part of the entity
- Find a good Chartered Accountant/CA (equivalent to CPA in US) who can help you set it up. DO NOT DO IT by yourself
- For a US based company, I had to do something called "Appostille" which is equivalent of a Notary but for Foreign stuff.
I can recommend the company we used that we still use. We pay them about 20,000 INR per month (about $250/Month) for a team of roughly 15 developers and they do all the setup, taxes, payroll, filings etc etc. PM me if anyone is interested.
That sounds exactly like they're needing a bribe, but you're too rooted in western ways of doing things that you don't realize it.
To me...if I have to pay someone to do their assigned job it seems like a bribe to me https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bribe (using money to affect the conduct of a person)
15 U.S. Code § 78dd–1(b)
Technically, you’re not even protected if you hire a local agent to do all of this for you.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/78dd-1
The point with a facilitating payment is that you've done everything that's actually required by law to e.g. get a business license and the official is still giving you the run-around, you are allowed to pay them. It doesn't apply in cases that relate to paying decision makers for contracts, for example.
If you're thinking about doing this, you should absolutely consult a lawyer, but the post above is wrong on the general construction of the law.
[0]: https://fcpablog.com/2017/05/24/hyperdynamics-another-fcpa-i...
Ask a real lawyer, obviously.
1) India's IRS still owes me tax-refund from 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001. I gave up trying to recoup long ago.
2) I inherited an inheritance in India from someone passing away (who died without a will). A family member managed to have everything put in their name.
Mindboggling.
Case in point: the "company stamps" that are required for everything you do with your business. From getting a debit card to changing the maturity instructions for a corporate deposit, you need to sign your name AND stamp it with your company stamp.
The company stamp can be made by anyone for $1-2. It has no bearing on security at all. Yet, you need to carry it with you if you want to get anything done.
It's utterly baffling. I can access my corporate bank account online and make any number of transactions, yet if I want to apply for a debit card, I need my company stamp and signatures from all directors.
Why? I have no idea!
Paperwork really isn't to blame here because even if everything was digital, the people behind the operation and the policies that govern their behavior is still the same. The problem isn't the interface between citizens and the government, it is the backend source code of the government.
You are all barking at the wrong tree.
Automated systems can be quite awful (original research: Spain) but neither paper or digital systems would officially state the human factors involved in turning them over. There's simply less opportunity for these human factors in more automated digital systems.
This usually fails for the reason you posted. I am not really sure how you are supposed to stop corruption once it gets rooted in your society. It is a vile and subversive menace that turns every one into a criminal, preying on their fellow man. A very unpleasant environment to live in.
The best article on corruption I have seen.(if you have time for an hour long power point presentation )
Well, guess what, the exact same thing happened in UK for PPE contracts:
"Within weeks of the company’s incorporation on 12 May 2020, PPE Medpro was awarded contracts worth £203m to supply millions of masks and gowns."
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/jan/07/michelle-mo...
With the typical Western "overpay for a modern tank/gun/piece of equipment by a factor of 2" style you still get a modern tank/gun/piece of equipment in the end.
From what I heard, for example, in Russia you do that but then the quartermaster goes and sells half of your equipment off on the black market and the grunts sell off the other half and replace it with something much inferior.
The first kind of corruption is bad and should be rooted out, but the second type is much more destructive as can be seen in Ukraine right now. Secrecy at all levels and for minor details, as well as "encouragement" from the highest levels of politics for this kind of theft are core ingredients.
Many studies have been done and this isn't really a thing. The government isn't paying 2x (or 100-1000x as is often the rumor) for a given thing. What they're paying is the price of certification and guarantees. If the law requires that a procured item be guaranteed to NOT catch fire in an oxygen-rich environment (because it could be used in space) then the price of that product--no matter how seemingly mundane--is going to be more expensive than if you "just bought it from the store". Because someone had to setup a complicated bureaucracy and certification testing process to cover that product and actually carry out the testing.
There's also product availability guarantees that add to the price of government-procured things: A lot of stuff the government buys must continue to be manufactured for the effective life of the product in the government. This means that companies supplying stuff need to stock and maintain replacement parts for lifespans that would normally be vastly longer that a typical product cycle. They may even need to keep people trained at making and repairing these goods. That costs a lot of money!
If you're looking for corruption in Western governments it's in the form of paying political campaigns (or entire parties) to get specific laws passed or not passed. That's the big one that causes basically all the major problems in Western politics.
To a lesser extent there's also corruption involving decision-making bureaucrats getting hired by the industries they regulated after their time in office is over (this should be illegal) and politicians with insider information trading stocks. Taking direct bribes also does happen but it's rare because it's too easy to get caught and the consequences are high (high risk, low reward most of the time).
Here in the West, there is much less corruption to begin with, but the work gets done for the most part. Result: things work
For example: you don't want to register your neighbor's daughter for taxes just so that she can babysit your child once or twice. That is crazytalk. And yes, a lot of countries make sure that small payments don't require registration or taxes. This was just a quick example to make the point, sometimes the general law is just not applicable to a local event and it is better that everyone ignores it.
But this is like cholesterol. The right amount in your body makes everything better. Too much and you are in deep trouble.
A government-run system--presumably--would take care of withholding the correct amount of taxes and also making sure the business/person paying a salary never has to worry about running afoul of the law (having the IRS or equivalent) come after them.
My point is that well run, non-corrupt, systems tend to have exemptions to make everything sane and reasonable. If these exemptions don't exist, you can believe that it is because the system is corrupt and not because they are trying to stop corruption.
In the UK, it wasn't corruption. These people were paid money for products, they delivered those products, the price paid wasn't excessive.
The UK has an independent auditor that found no evidence of corruption, and that (where product was delivered incorrectly) it was due to problems with contract specs.
Afaik, there is only one case where a person was directly involved in politics and was related to a vendor, they went to great lengths to hide their connection to a vendor, repeatedly lied to civil servants who questioned them, and is now being charged criminally (for some reason, the person who made the original comment about the UK chose not to mention it, it was PPE Medpro).
The issue was that at the start of Covid, the govt called up all their suppliers asked for PPE, and they said they didn't have any. So the govt started using suppliers who often had other businesses that imported product from China (and had to set up new companies). The level of profit on the contract was normal, the price was higher but that was related to the pandemic (how quickly forgotten, in the UK there was literally no PPE for most of 2020, you couldn't buy masks at any price).
So the flexibility already exists...the UK is not corrupt, things happen naturally. Corruption is only necessary where there are supply-side bottlenecks due to politics (i.e. Qatar, Russia, India).
Which I think is a fair point but does raise some questions about the competency of the civil servants and politicians we trust with a fairly large chunk of our income.
It smells very bad.
No, the priority list wasn't. To approve a vendor through the normal process would have taken years, the fast track process was created to get PPE quicker than normal. I believe all but one person was unrelated to the Tories, the only person who wasn't (as I have said) repeatedly lied about their connection to the vendor, and is now facing criminal charges.
And the 50% is profit. Obviously.
The reason they got special treatment was because of the speed. That was what the priority list was for - "establishes that presence on the high priority lane did not confer any advantage at the decision-making stage of the process", what you have linked me is exactly what I was just told you. The award wasn't unlawful, the govt did not report on the detail of the contracts within the time period required...that was unlawful, but a function of the process (again, the contracts were awarded outside the usual process so all the information wasn't gathered...the NAO conducted a full audit of the contracts, iirc, before the contract details were reported in the public database).
And the fact that companies were treated the same when they were assessed doesn't alter the fact that being assessed sooner rather than later is a massive advantage.
There are companies that made no upfront investment, ordering equipment from China without any understanding of what they are ordering, any relevant experience, and huge quantities fo PPE had to be destroyed because it was not fit for purpose and did not meet regulatory requirements. Most of the companies contracted had no experiece of dealing with medical equipment ever before. I personally know people who have experience in the industry and government passed them up for contracts in favour of the shitsters that were chosen.
More disturbing (to me) is how easy it is to eliminate corruption in any given area - without any brutality or anything else extraordinary. Just setup the process correctly, incentivize workforce - and the same people who were building roadblocks to milk money will switch to earning money by helping you get your task done.
There was a “widely known in narrow circles” libertarian setup in Troitsk, Russia - of all places. The setup was related to the topic of the original post - registration of businesses. The post-Soviet business registration law was rather liberal. The amount of documents needed was not zero, but doable. But there was a catch - businesses should have been registered locally, and each locality was allowed to add their own requirements on top of federal ones.
You can imagine what followed. Our own city, the I was a counsel member was: just prove to us (“us” in reality means -a clerk) that your business will be useful to the city - and we will register you. But there was a small city named Troitsk, home to some physics scientific institutions, which elected a libertarian mayor, Gennady Lebedev. The city council decided not to ask for any additional documents and just register any business that complied with federal guidelines.
But - any clerk has any good intention in his own hands, right? Mayor said: register everyone? but I am too busy, come tomorrow, and by the way go to… uhm police station, do a background check on yourself for me, I feel a sudden need to be extra cautious in your case. Why not? Seen it everywhere, like you’ve said.
Here comes handy a proper construction of checks and balances:
1. Salary for registration office clerks was paid from a percentage of the (federally fixed) registration fee, nothing else, no safety cushion. If you delay an application- your salary will be delayed too. In the starving Russia that percentage created a - potentially - extremely well paying job.
2. The clerk will be fired if he asked - not just for any unnecessary documents, but just for asking any legally unnecessary question.
3. The clerk will be also fired if he accepts a registration that does not confirm to federal guidelines.
So clerks have the incentive to work fast, help people correct their documents to comply with the federal law and the opportunity for any additional “milking” was too risky and simply not worth it. In short time - small Troitsk had more businesses registered than any other small city in Russia, and comparable to Moscow. Imagine a tax base they’ve got?
First-hand account by Gennadi himself here (in Russian): http://www.sapov.ru/g_v_lebedev/texts/gvl1992_12_troitsk01.h...
>3. The clerk will be also fired if he accepts a registration that does not confirm to federal guidelines.
Fired by whom? Who is in charge of checking this? How do you ensure that the clerk isn't just accepting false businesses and giving a percentage to whoever's above? On its face this system doesn't seem to cure a culture of corruption to me
What do you mean by a “false business”? Here in the US the state of Nevada have not asked me anything except Articles of Incorporation (the state of California later found my file and… also has not asked me anything except $800 a year - which exactly what I was hoping to avoid by filing in Nevada, lol). Number of federally required papers was 0 (zero).
Federal regulations in Russia required much more paperwork. But the libertarian city council in Troitsk just deliberately didn’t care to add anything to the pile. Bad documents - it was actually a problem for the business being registered. If federal regulators caught a discrepancy- the business will be in a huge trouble. So checking the documents- it was nothing more than a service provided by a city council to the company being registered. If the documents were inconsistent - the business will complain.
This setup really worked, as I said in the original post. It’s not a theoretical suggestion.
Now, you could call the national money system to be a public service provided by the government (and indirectly by private businesses).
If you were to issue your own money what would it's liquidity premium be? It would be very low to be sure because barely anyone accepts it.
So, the holders of money effectively own a free subscription to this public service. If they lend out money, they will obviously charge a fee in proportion to the liquidity premium. This fee is included in the interest rate.
The borrower is now paying for the liquidity premium, the cost has been fully internalized and the problem is gone right?
The problem is that the liquidity premium that is part of the interest rate is erroneously calculated as the cost of capital. It is not, it is the cost of liquidity.
Now, things will get very strange. When the borrower spends his money, he will be obligated to pay the subscription fee, the cost of liquidity, even though he no longer has the money and he is no longer benefiting from the liquidity services. What this means is that the money system constantly screws over people who use money as a medium of exchange and rewards those who sabotage it. It will look as if those who "save" money will be rewarded for their frugality and "moral" behaviour and those who are in debt are being rightly punished for their unsustainable and and "sinful" behaviour.
Now imagine if private households all follow this strategy of selling more than they buy and saving and lending the rest. There must be another sector that earns less than they spend and accumulates debt though borrowing. The government is forced to avoid austerity at all costs. It must become the "immoral sinner" that spends in excess to shield the private sector.
If you want to solve the problem you would have to make buying and lending symmetric. Lending passes the cost of liquidity onto someone else which is in theory ok but only if buying also passes the cost of liquidity onto the seller so that no liquidity premium accrues to the lender. He will pay a liquidity premium and earn liquidity premium which then zeroes. The only one who then collects the liquidity premium is the central bank that issues the money.
The problem with this is that the interest rate on cash would be negative and paper technology isn't advanced enough to calculate and display a dynamically changing face value. It isn't some conspiracy by a cabal, it is actually an engineering problem that originates from our historical and cultural attachment to cash. Humans aren't evil bribe collecting monsters, they are just in a rationality trap that is difficult to escape.
Well, assuming that all people are roughly the same as each other, the answer would be to adopt traditions and systems from countries that aren't corrupt. Attempt the sisyphean task of convincing people that giving power to the middle class is going to lead to a better future.
As your comment reveals, the instinct when confronted with corruption is ... centralise power and try to force it to be used for good. That doesn't work, so try to convince people to decentralise power. Political and bureaucratic elites are regularly revealed to be corrupt, so stop making them the bottleneck for handing out the "allowed to run a business!" stamp. Centralising power just gives corrupt people a target to aim for and increases the blast radius when they worm their way in to a position.
How you convince people to do the sensible thing and decentralise power is beyond me though. The instinct to push power to a single leader is remarkably strong in humans.
The knee jerk reaction against corruption is to centralize power: "X institutions are corrupt, we will give more power to this candidate who demonstrated to be a good person, so he will vanish those institutions and saves us fron corruption".
That's what Bolsonaro did in Brazil. In his campaign, he demonstrated to be a good christian and a person of faith. In Brazil, people strongly associate that with being a good person.
Guess what happened after.
Wasn't Bolsonaro elected because the previous president and his main opponent (Lula?) was so corrupt that he even landed in jail, which is a rare event for a prominent politician?
> Guess what happened after.
Care to explain to non Brazilians?
I couldn't understand why our news in Germany was pretending that a guy convinced of corruption would be a saviour of Brazil against the evil Bolsonaro.
That highlights one of the main problems in our societies. We just accept information served to us by our governments without much checking. Either because we don't care about every topic, or because we don't have a means to actually check.
Simplifying, it's like this: If the road to presidency is corrupt, you either become also corrupt (on a varying degree) or stay as one of those parties with no more than 1% of the votes. But then, there's a pact of silence between cronies. And those who are accused of corruption are the ones that either went too far or went against powerful people in the government.
I take all those trials with a grain of salt.
[1] https://www.axios.com/2022/09/13/us-treasury-department-torn...
Al the cases were dismissed because a new law was passed that created a new court and said every case like Lula's should be judged only on that new court.
There's not much to stop a crook being both officially well paid and totally corrupt.
A fish rots from the head down.
and
Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
and
Nothing disinfects better than sun light.
IMHO they all apply when dealing with public servants in unchecked positions of power.
Is it true? Well, maybe. From Van Rijckeghem and Weder (2001):
> ... we find evidence of a statistically and economically significant relationship between relative wages and corruption.... While economically significant, the relationship, nevertheless, implies that a large increase in wages is required to eradicate corruption solely by raising wages... The relationship between wages and corruption is not found in regressions with country-fixed effects which points to ineffectual wage policy in the short run...
I haven't found much better evidence than that, though there is Di Tella & Schargrodsky (2004) with a detailed study on a hospital.
For example, during British Raj almost any British who could, got a job to move these papers in India. India inherited that machinery and hasn't moved to economical right yet. The current government is trying but you can read how it is a bad government in western media since it came to power. The corruption in government allows foreign interference so of course.
- unhappy Indian
<blockquote>But the government is as complete a bureaucracy as that of Russia.</blockquote>
The British Raj kept creating more and more bureaucracy paid for taxes exacted by causing famines, increasing in frequency and intensity. This system was inherited by Nehru and Congress. They were socialists so they increased bureaucracy but they didn't increase corruption - independent India has not seen a famine caused by taxes even in the direst of times.
Deregulation is the best cure for corruption, because it makes the gatekeepers obsolete. There would be no reason to bribe them because you don't need their approval in the first place.
In Norway this road fund fee is collected automatically by the insurance company. This is obviously easier for the user (zero paperwork), less work for the state, and prevents scam artists from duping people.
And back on the subject of registering a company: in Norway this is done online and takes minutes.
Interpersonal networks and middlemen routers evolve over time into parallel tracks of shared understanding about how to achieve mundane process flows and solve problems when the official channels are broken.
The difference, and it's a major one, is that paperwork does not slow the pace of work in Japan. Once papers are there, progress is usually instantaneous.
Congratulations you aren't one of them.
Corruption is everywhere, it's just on different levels. Usually in more "developed" (I don't like that word) countries you see corruption on the highest levels, and people actually get away with it.
This isn’t about a particular political party.
Even the much hated fauci was a career bureaucrat under numerous administrations, of both parties.
Yeah, and long after that they decided to build a second pipeline (Nord Stream 2).
And before that, they've been received the same gas from the same foreign company over the ex-SU Ukrainian pipelines.
And five years later we will likely see Turkish pipelines (still bearing Russian gas) prolonged to Hungary, from where it will reach Germany once again.
And that foreign company isn't even running those Nord Stream pipelines - they were largely German, due to legislations requiring separation of the pipeline operator and the supplier.
Don't underestimate how much Germany had profited from all the cheap gas and infrastructure investments from the said foreign country, up until they managed to loose it all just for the sake of political appearance and no real substantial win.
I wonder if we would some day see Scholz in some American LNG company for which the nation now has to pay order of magnitude more, than it ever paid to Russia.
It hardly supports the thesis above. Germany is not rotten to the core by corruption. It's not a constant hindrance to someone trying to get things done.
But at the large scale, we are absolutely a corrupt nation: our former Chancellor Schröder sold us out to Russia, there have been dozens of millions euros worth of (shockingly ruled legal) corruption during the pandemic, the large companies ("Deutschland AG") have an extremely cozy relationship with almost all parties in Germany, not to mention corporate donations and sponsorship of party gatherings (except far-right AfD whom no one serious wants to donate money to and far-left Linke who refuse to take corporate donations out of principle).
Oh that new building code or electrical code just so happens to only be fulfilled by using the latest (patented) product by company X?
Well it's the state of the art, we can't build below that standard anymore.
EDIT: Nobody wants to donate overtly to the AfD, that's why they had already multiple investigations into their finances and donations. A large part of which came from Switzerland. They do have those donation scandals in common with the CDU and CSU, those received anonymous donations in cash in briefcases. And Schäuble, who ended up as Finance Minister in the federal government later, got away with, I kid you not, "I do not remember that briefcase containing 100,000 bucks" (emphasize from me). So, it seems all parties in Germany are corrupt, some more than others, with the exact degree of corruption directly proportional to the time in actual power.
This is true in most highly industrialised countries. Can you name any where this is not true? I don't know any.
Another way to think about it: What is the polar opposite? "the large companies ... extremely unhealthy / combative relationship with almost all [political] parties". That sounds like the bad old days in 1980s India. Most economies would be a wreck if that were true.
If you follow the law to the letter, and you don't get what you want, the mere threat of hiring a lawyer will get it sorted.
The only issue is the speed. I see people lose their job offer before they even start, because the immigration office is too slow.
For Switzerland, well, a quick search for money laundering gives you all the information you need.
EDIT: Both the FIFA and the IOCI, probably the most corrupt organizations on earth, are having their seats in Switzerland.
I cannot find the word "corruption" anywhere. What am I missing?
Edit: Both, the Spiegel affaire and the Lockheed bribery scandal are mentioned.
I've had employees (in Brazil) who don't ever claim reimbursement on personal expenses because if their paycheck varies too much their bank freezes their funds (in the name of preventing money laundering) and then the employee has to go to the bank and bribe someone to get the funds unfrozen. Just showing the cause for the variation in payroll doesn't cut it. As the employee puts it, every requirement to show up in front of an official for anything requires a bribe.
Corruption is a weird thing. Why do some countries have more of it than others -- holding GDP per capita constant? I cannot explain it. Look at the United States -- "googols" of money spent to influence lawmakers. It cannot be healthy and looks like legalised bribery in comparison to other highly developed democracies.
the business model of corruption is : 1- slow the process as much as you can 2- some people will have deadlines and will be willing to pay to meet them 3- profit
the slowness is there on purpose, to be able to provide quick process as a paid service
In the article, the author needs to chase dozens of different bits of paperwork. Quite a few there were no problem. But quite a few incompetent, corrupt, or both. Now, how about a system where you submit one application in one place, and if other departments need to know or collect fees or approve it is the responsibility of the submission point to pay or collect approvals? One desk is held responsible.
just use your personal pan card to open a bank account, get a GST registration, do income tax audit and you will be done. No compliance, no nothing.
i do taxes and books for businesses with 250+ Crore turnover and they are all sole proprietorships. Why? the simple answer is why bother? you can have all the employees,all the corporate hierarchy and still be a proprietorship...
One part of the problem is all the professionals milking companies for "compliance management fees" but in the end of the day, my suggestion to businesses is unless you REALLY REALLY need a company, please don't bother
lets just say it is easier to "appropriate" the books as a sole proprietorship.
you have to pay mca fees for your authorized capital, one off but if you are doing serious business, it costs.
i know, 5% "might" sound a lot in taxes but by fudging some numbers, by not paying complaince fees, by not being on the hook for a "lot of compliance" and the penalties that come up, it does not sound worth the risk....
Look, if you are doing big business, want to raise money from the public, sure go ahead but not otherwise.
And this is the corruption mentality right there.
You do if you want outside investment. Or if you want professional management. Or if you want to seriously engage in international business.
What you say is true: most businesses are sole proprietorships. But that's a significant and manufactured barrier to growth.
As for funding and business strategy, it will get bit tricky because you will now have to think of different ways of financing instead of VCs. But it is nothing different than VC financing (and you get to keep 100% of your company).
Bureaucracy will remain obdurate as long as members of the bureaucracy are feted by society. Ideally, bureaucrats should be invisible. But in India, IAS/IPS officers make headlines regularly.
I won't get even started about the sheer amount of man hours wasted in preparing for administrative exams. Statistically, less than 0.1% of the people preparing for IAS exams will actually be selected. The remaining 99.9% waste YEARS of their lives in this futile endeavor instead of actually building and learning.
I remain bearish on India as long as the bureaucracy remains paramount.
If you are in UP and Bihar. That's not true for the rest of the country.
Between these four states alone, we're talking about 40% of the country's population.
If more than half of your country believes something, it can be said to be the majority opinion.
Google Sensei tells me:
UP: 204.2M
Bihar: 99.02M
Rajasthan: 68.89M
Madhya Pradesh: 73.34M
Even with more muted growth, current population would be 230M+ for UP and 125M+ for Bihar.
IAS folk make on the order of a $1M/pa with all their kickbacks. They often even get to send their kids to study in the West for "free" through "scholarships" (as a quid-pro-quo for compromising national interest). The demand is quite high (see marriage portals).
IPS is one tier lower. Though, anyone who has studied the hallowed history of the former commission of Mumbai knows this is also not something to sneeze at.
I think the funniest and most embarassing story I have about travel in India: The first day in downtown Mumbai, I go to the train stain to buy a ticket for a Churchgate station a few stops away. Honestly, I have no idea what the price will be, but I assume 20-30 rupees. I only have 100 rupee notes. I go to the ticket window: Lady tells me: "5 rupees". I gasped, and looked at my 100 rupee note. She rejects my 100 rupee note! (She was not disrespectful; said: you will take all my change! Wait here; after next person, I can sell it to you.) Next person pays with enough change, then me. All good. We both laughed. To put that in perspective, that is about 2-3 Euro CENTS to ride the train!
Edit- echoing a comment further down. I got an Indian visa. It was done online and was emailed to me in 24hrs.
Legacy of British civil service and bureaucracy ?
See also, "no you don't understand, we had to start a war with the Muslims in the West because the British didn't tell them to be our second class citizens fast enough"
So I was sent off and queued up to get my bag scanned and more importantly get my receipt stamped to say it'd been scanned walked back through the crowds where I could have done anything with the bag - to the luggage drop where the attendant checked that I had the correct stamps to say it had been checked! No seals on the bag, nothing to stop me giving them a different bag, just the essential stamp on a bit of paper!
You'll usually be frisked at the mall entrance. Women will only get frisked by a female security guard. If the female security guard is absent (pretty common), any female visitor can just walk through without getting frisked.
Was certainly not my experience 20 years ago.
We had that craze in Poland, but somehow managed to slowly crawl out of it over the last 20 years. It was a slow and painful process: even when the laws were changed not to require stamps, many places would ask for them and you would have to explain that your company stamp doesn't exist, so you can't place one on the form.
It's one of those bureaucratic viruses of the mind. We're lucky to have gotten rid of it, but there are others! Examples are "fill your forms with a BLUE pen" (supposedly because it looks less "photocopied"?), "sign legibly" (I never know if I'm supposed to use my signature or sign my name), "your national ID card number" (it's idiotic to ask for one, as it changes if you lose your ID and get a new one). There was also a period where every company would photocopy your ID (for example when signing up for a cellular plan), until the government stepped in and declared it illegal.
Bureaucracy is like barnacles on a ship: you have to constantly fight the growth.
I suppose they mean to say "don't make a squiggly line (parafka) and call it a signature".
Now they've brought them back again.
Please also provide two self attested photocopies.
(It’s interesting to think about why attestation is required.)
If you get a color print and get it laminated, your unofficial Aadhar suddenly becomes "official".
I've had so many arguments with officials about this its unreal.
> its a digital document and Aadhar website explicitly states that every copy of Aadhar is an "official" copy
part multiple times to people in my family, but had assumed this would be basic knowledge to government officials.
Rogers and his wife had left India's State of Manipur and were safely across the border in Myanmar. But wait, here comes an Indian official running after them, who says that they can't leave, because, they didn't have permission to be in Manipur. "He was telling us — I am not making this up — that we had to return to Manipur, because we were not allowed to be in Manipur, and thus we could not leave it," Rogers relates. The debate lasted for two hours before, "someone made a phone call and took the subinspector off the hook, and we were free to proceed."
Overall, kind of logic so, because how can you leave a place you didn't enter in the first place because you had no permit to enter it? Mind blowing!
The threat isn't "we're going to keep you here because you weren't allowed to be here," it's "we see you have overstayed your visa and now we're going to make sure you catch your flight out and ban you from ever coming back."
Once I ordered some drinks brought up to my hotel room around 10 in the evening. It took forever - turned out the guy who made the drinks was sent home for the day. So the hotel called him back and had him return just so he could come and make the drinks and bring them to my room. Because that was his job - nobody elses.
This was at a five star hotel in Amritsar.
Our driver slept in the car outside the hotel and was on call 24/7 for our entire stay.
Quite different from western countries for sure.
However, Amritsar is famous for the golden temple which is the the holiest of all Sikh shrines. They said it was most beautiful to view at night. So we went there late at night parking closeby , walking there there we passed by the rickshaw drivers sleeping in their rickshaws as far as i could gather they had no other place to sleep. So they had it even worse.
Not to mention the child beggars of New delhi or the makeshift camps you saw driving along the highway.
All of this was approx 10 years ago.
It for sure opened my eye to the destitute and poverty.
I remember once my wife and I wanted to travel by train to a tourist town. After buying the tickets, we realized we had made a mistake (actually, _they_ had made a mistake). So we decided to cancel our tickets and just buy new ones.
We had to fill in an application, attach photos of ourselves, as well as our copies of our passports ... all to cancel a ticket! Boggles the mind.
It feels like a Kabuki theater, set up to keep the people busy and employed.
The author had added a correction to the post (12th August 2020) stating that this was a mistake, and that the actual procedure was much less cumbersome:
https://web.archive.org/web/20200812093618/https://superr.in...
> It has been bought to my attention that there was a mistake by an entry level employee.
> So the Revenue Department itself was supposed to get all the NOCs required by going to all those offices, but an entry level employee forgot to add my file to the list of NA’s to be done.
> [...] But PLEASE UNDERSTAND that “it was a mistake” in filing by an Entry Level Employee and normally this procedure takes less than 2 months and all the heavy lifting is done by the Revenue Department, Collector Office.
Tweet from the author about the correction: https://twitter.com/mrohanshah/status/1293170591441104902
But the correction was removed after a while, so maybe a bit of clarification will help.
That was the official response I got from the district administration so had to post it. Also was being pressured by the government (indirectly) to take it down. So that was all bs. Next update I'll give is when I will have solved the problem.
Why am I not surprised.
Do you mind sharing how?
Well, I though it was this way everywhere in the world. In Europe, at least, you cannot build anything on agricultural land unless it is a n agricultural structure or you get the classification changed, which is not easy.
All this does is creates a set of entrenched local businesses which run hand-in-hand very transparently with local political interests. This is the whole reason Western folks never understand why China succeeded so fast, it is because they made the trade-offs necessary for growth. For rapid growth you cannot make everyone happy right away.
The good thing about India is that e-Governance initiatives have at least provided some transparency and understanding for the average person which did not exist before.
What seems overly complex and inefficient is the amount of permissions and the subpermissions.
Even to my German bueorcracy adjusted ears this sounds like a great way to extract bribes and fees. At least the process here is quite clear (but not always fast)
53% of India's land area is arable land: 790 people per square kilometer of arable land, or 1270 square meters of arable land per person. I feel like 100 square meters of factory area per person is more than adequate, which would decrease the arable land by some 8% if you built it all on previously cultivated fields, rather than mountains or forests or deserts (or polders!); but that assumes you're employing the entire population in the factories.
Some factories do have lower density than that; for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NUMMI was 370 acres (150 hectares in modern units) and employed 5500 people at its closure in 02006. This works out to 270 square meters per worker. But now https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Fremont_Factory occupies that space and some additional (175 hectares total) and employs 22000 people, 80 square meters per person, despite extensive automation.
If some of those factories are producing fertilizers, tractors, irrigation equipment, and food products, converting some fields into factories might actually increase your agricultural production rather than decreasing it. Germany harvests 7 tonnes of cereals per hectare that's planted in cereals; India, despite being tropical, harvests only 3.3: https://tradingeconomics.com/india/cereal-yield-kg-per-hecta...
Allocating scarce resources like land by means of capitalism is maybe not ideal unless you can make more of them (polders!), but it does seem to work better than allocating them by bureaucracy and laws.
My father's has an orange field, so at some point he wanted to dig a well to get some water.
He went to the City Hall, got all the tricky paperwork and applied for permission to build it. Months passed by without hearing anything, and at some point he just forgot about it, assuming he'd be denied silently. There's some people in the city hall don't like him too much BTW.
Few years later an official from the government came, "I'm here to check on the well you built", to which my father was of course confused "what well? You never gave me permission to dig it!". Apparently and according to this official, the normal thing to do is that you apply for permission, then build the project and finally then you'll receive the permission eventually, so he'd assumed my father had the well built already. Since as mentioned some people were against him, he was also not gonna officially break the law and build it before getting permission.
Completely legal, but a good illustration of how even our new (and honestly much improved) zoning is too restrictive.
And then of course you can't just build on it. You may attempt to reclassify it into building land but from TFA it seems the process is just as tedious as in India and definietely not guaranteed to succeed.
Theres a big chance, once you get to the building, you will have to monitor the builders constantly otherwise they rob you blind. From my friend in India I was told they have the same problem.
I didn't say the goverment is schizofrenic, but their message certainly plays on xenophobic fears. Its clearly a part of a populist agenda, because we need people with capital buying up land, but its super easy to frame this as a malevolent action to less educated people, and that is what is being done for purely political reasons. And this policy is exactly what I would call "overly prohibiting": I can't sell my farmland even to local farmers who live a few miles away cause they happen to be in a different couty. Cmon thats just stupid.
I think in the US this is called Zoning and you need Zoning permissions or something similar.
Then you probably need a building permit, but they usually just need the plans for the building to be built for that.
Nobody will ever openly admit they want a bribe. They will just drown you in bureaucracy until you get the idea.
There are countries of which India is one of them where you can't do any serious business without paying bribes. Serious business is anything where a government official even suspects you may have money to pay the bribe. So maybe not a hairdresser, but if you have money to buy a piece of land you are expected to have money to pay bribes.
There is a lot of examples of large companies that came to the same conclusion. For example, Ikea tried to do business in Russia without paying bribes and gave up. They also decided they will not be supporting corruption but they failed, faced the choice to pay bribes or get out and decided to get out.
India is corrupt to the bone. Corruption is way of life. It is a reason for people to get government jobs which otherwise do not pay enough.
If government jobs do not pay enough and people self select themselves to get these jobs anyway only because they plan on getting bribes to supplement their salary, how prevalent corruption would be?
This actually is the reason why fighting corruption is so hard. Because people self select themselves and displace those who do not accept corruption from those jobs. Then these officials advance and take up high level jobs and pretty soon you have entire structure corrupt to the bone at every level.
This post and the OP's decisions seem to me to be part of an attempt to decrease corruption in India.
It isn't even going to prove any point or make the problem any more public. Because Indians are extremely well aware of the problem and they all know a lot of these stories from their own life.
Regular people will never get rid of corruption exactly because of the effect I mentioned -- because people self select themselves into government jobs. A government position is way more lucrative to a person that plans on being corrupt than to a person that plans to only live from the official salary.
It is like trying to explain to extremists (say Republican extremists, or nazi, or communist, etc.) why what they are doing is bad. You can reach individuals and even convince them to your point but then those individuals leave their extremist circles leaving those circles exactly as extremist as they were before.
In what sense is the author trying to pull a fast one? They own agricultural land. It is legal to convert agricultural-use land to non-agricultural-use land. There is a legal procedure for doing so. The author is trying to follow the procedure. The procedure turns out to be very difficult, and they publicize this fact. Where is the 'fast one' being pulled and who is it being pulled on?
> Obviously, they are playing “hard to get” to get me to pay some bribe and initiate the process. But after going through all this, I am not going to pay any bribe to anyone.
And:
> And they openly demanded bribes after waiting for four months.
> So the Gram Panchayat NOC is stuck because of non payment of bribe.
Duh?
Not really. If normalized, it's part of their expected compensation package. Practically speaking, I think I'd suck it up and pay the bribe in the author's position. But I'd know I was doing wrong.
But it already is normalised. I think this is morally difficult because it is customary, expected and if you refuse you will not get anything done but also won't change anything. So what have you gained?
I don't think you can fight corruption this way, you just can't do it alone.
The FCPA basically says that as a representative of a US corporation (in my case, anyone at a Staff Engineer level or above), it's illegal to bribe an official of a foreign government.
It does try to make a distinction (sort of) between the kinds of bribe you're talking about but in my FCPA training, that "distinction" boils down to "go ask your lawyer." The lawyer will just tell you how to do it in a way that doesn't look like a bribe, even though it still is.
It just adds yet another layer.
Just as an FYI it’s very hard to be convicted of under FCPA if you’re just operating in a personal capacity. So don’t worry about bribing policemen in foreign counties.
> Duh?
It's only "Duh" because you snipped the qualifier out. It's not "Duh" if you read until the end of the sentence like you normally do:
> in an area where bribery is customary
See?
To bring it to the extremes: If I found myself visiting Germany during World War 2, I would still strongly object to killing jews, even if it was "customary" there.
And since know this is a reductio-at-hitlerum, I will try again: I would not seek or consent or engage to having pedophilic sexual intercourse if I found myself in certain neighborhoods of Thailand, where apparently it is commonplace.
Perhaps a bit less extreme: I would not expect someone who is a convinced vegetarian to start consuming meat when they arrive to my country just because meat is consumed in almost every meal here.
As I see it, cultures are different and one thing that is considered an absolute taboo in one culture might be customary in another. Tips in the US are customary yet at the same time they are offensive in Japan. Bribes are killing the economy in my country yet it makes economy moving in India.
PS: I personally hate corruption more than anything.
Do you have any first hand or second hand experience with it?
From my experience most people working these jobs prefer the tips system the way it is because a lot of times it's in cash so they can fudge their tax numbers if they want (might not be true nowadays as less people use cash), and also because often they make more money through tips than minimum wage, and they think if tips were removed the restaurants would only pay them minimum wage.
I think my shock was greater when I discovered that lobbying in the US means "literal legal bribery". In a lot of the western world that word it means things "having meetings" and perhaps "organizing PR campaigns". Straight up giving money to politicians is against the law.
This is what the internet thinking lobbying means because they just want to be angry at a thing without bothering to learn about it because that would expose their own political apathy. Lobbying in the US means the exact same things that it means in the rest of the world. Companies will donate a few thousand dollars, so that a legislature will hear them out, but the legislature doesn't have to listen to them. There is some sketchy stuff going on with campaign finance for sure, but it's no where near as bad as "legalized bribery."
You might want to revise that assumption.
https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/top-spenders
I believe that’s at least 4 orders of magnitude higher than “thousands of dollars”. I rest my case
These are just some recent examples of federal politicians who have run afoul of these laws, but they apply at all levels of government, as well as to staff (both campaign staff and the official staff of elected officials).
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_Cunningham
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duncan_D._Hunter
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Jackson_Jr.
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Grimm_(politician)
Up to 1 year in prison.
Money paid illegally to gain an unfair advantage, that will result in local prosecution if discovered and is not the usual practise is a "bribe". No one should pay those.
Money paid illegally to gain normal access/approvals/licenses etc, where it is entirely normal to pay and unlikely to lead to local prosecution is "extortion".
Op isn't really paying a bride, he's being extorted.
This is a notoriously difficult process in any developed nation, and is often even impossible, because the state has decided that a particular area should be dedicated to agriculture (the nation has to feed itself, etc).
1) People succeed here inspite of the government, not cause of it.*
2) Indians can be successful anywhere except India.
*Unless you are rich enough to bend the laws to your needs.
However during the last years Ukraine is getting rid of corruption at an escape velocity and hopefully at that speed we will be able to be done with it within ten years or so.
I had a friend who worked at Kyiv since 2014, first as a nightclub owner, then as a security contractor salesman/manager, and he told me that low-level corruption there was divided by two overnight (during Covid).
I don't know what happened, but i guess it is easier to pass harsher or society-changing laws during a pandemic.
This is why the speed of reforms in Ukraine is mind-boggling. Absolutely nothing short of amazing.
Fine, so be it. Pay the bribes and get to work.
I once lived in such a country*. The unfairness is built in, but if you have the money, you can get whatever you need relatively quickly.
If you are trying to save money, fine. But you are willing to go to court, which is even more expensive. And all that time wasted you could have been earning revenue. So instead, pay the bribes, start the company, get workers and build clout, and have the power to make change!
* Said country has made huge strides to combat this and become legit in the past 30 years, and that has made everyone more wealthy - even those employees that can no longer collect bribes.
Like everything in life, there is always a trade off.
We have a see-saw. One side has indignation, encouraging corruption at the level of one bribe, cost. The other side has time, factory, jobs, and possibly more influence to change the system.
And from my experience, the people getting the bribe don't see it as unethical - it may even be their "salary". (Eg. Counselors don't get paid in many summer camps, they just get tips. Parents views the tips as extortion. Is it unethical to tip? No, but the whole system is corrupt and should be changed. /rant)
Assuming that system is built this way (so the risk of paying the bribe is nominal), and you have the resources to pay it, it is the cost of doing business. It is unfortunate, but I do not understand why the cost is not worth it.
Equitable working conditions make working more appealing to a worker - and this is extended to the "fairness" of your workplace. Tips are not "the cost of doing business", they are similarly an expectation passed down from authority to the workers to extract their wages opportunistically. People being accustomed to it does not mean that the issue is resolved, because it still leaves the financial risk in the hands of the worker should the business' profitability shift. And so bribes are similarly unethical.
Moving on from the issue of bribes to the bribe receiver, they are also very obviously an imposition to the giver. Not further, they make the "true cost" of a transaction less clear to varying degrees, allowing a services cost to vary very highly compared to what the public might think it is.
There is no good argument for a bribe.
I’m not exactly sure what you’re saying here, but corruption does exist everywhere. It’s just a question of how pervasive it is, how much it’s actually enshrined in law, etc. (E.g. campaign finance laws in the US essentially legalize corruption, which could perhaps be argued to be like decriminalizing drugs in order to better control them, although whether that’s the actual intent is debatable.)
The Corruption Perception Index and the Global Corruption Index might help get a sense of this. As is typical with such lists, the top performers (last corrupt) tend to be countries with smaller populations. With bigger populations, the risk and incidence of corruption increases.
https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2021 https://risk-indexes.com/global-corruption-index/
Cringe.
He made plenty of enemies along the way, but somehow managed to keep on punching. And it truly is much better for everyone.
Since most people think like that, things don't change and everybody is miserable. Cudos to the author for not accepting this rampant corruption.
> If you are trying to save money, fine
If that's really what you think the authors motivation is then you may have missed the point of the article.
This whole "but this single action won't change anything " attitude may feel rational, and even be (selfishly) rational, but the effect comes through the aggregate. Lots of people in society behaving like that, and you get emergent properties caused by the aggregate of those individual choices. A dangerous (and pretty selfish) path to go in societies.
So you're saying during Jim Crow people should have refused to build factories? I don't follow your point, laws which attack black people are very different from bureaucracies that require bribery to give you permits for your business. I mean both are bad, but they are very different, and Jim Crow is a thousand times worse, both because of it's basic nature and because it was the law of the land and enforced with the full power of the government (vs corruption, which is people sneaking around in violation of the law).
This is what you are doing: "So you think it's ok to just pay it when the police to give you a speeding ticket when you weren't speeding!? That means you are fine with the holocaust!"
Up to 1 year in prison. Do you wish to be exposed to this?
https://edtimes.in/why-was-formula-1-racing-forced-out-of-in...
To offer an alternative, starting business in India is extremely easy (at least Software Business), People have been running a business, filing GST, owning trademarks without leaving their apartment - Thanks to online services which ease these things. But yes, things are still difficult for manufacturing and land related things (and I assume it would be similar in other parts of the world, granted not so difficult).
This is an absolutely ridiculous demand to make. This is because of the very complicated way the GST structure works in India.
The systems in India are designed to complicate life for the ordinary person
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mnB5Q5Hay4 ... translated subtitles are decent. Money shot: "It's like that: We can't all sit with a MacBook in Berlin in a cafe, sipping on a chai latte and programming the tenth dating app. Sometimes, someone has to work with their hands."
They had all the connections so setting things up was quick. Then we needed a factory so I visited a bunch of factories owned by the conglomerate. We picked one and they set aside some space to build our stuff. We didn't get soaked in that deal; I think that was because the factory wasn't really making much money and they figured the JV would throw off more cash.
We also worked with some other suppliers; I visited them directly, negotiated terms, and only then brought in the big guns from our partner. I figured that would mean we'd get the best deal: either the special deal for a new customer or the special deal for one of the big guys, whichever was cheaper. The latter was always cheaper, but I always wondered: would that have been true had we not already negotiated a ceiling on the price?
And in the end...the person assigned to be the CEO of the JV by the partner, a nice guy who seemed to work hard...embezzled most of the capital!
But my big lessons were: 1 - work with a partner who already knows whose hand to shake and 2 - don't try to do anything new; modify an existing structure. In that, the latter case is similar to what apparently is the standard way to open a restaurant in America: don't rent an empty space and fit it out as a restaurant; instead take over the lease and permits from someone who went bankrupt doing that, and run your restaurant on their kitchen setup and permits.
> I understand the reasoning behind the need for a PWD NOC. What if they’re planning to build a road through the land on which we intend to do our construction. It’s certainly worth notifying the public works department before we do any construction activity.
Seems strange to me that it is on you to check that the government isn't planning on building on the land you own.
The difficulty is not the manufacturing plant. It is the conversion of agriculture land to non agriculture land.
I find the title and the conclusion by the author very misleading.
It would make more sense to time-limit some of these things and make the various departments reapply every 2 years if they think the process serves a purpose still. Perhaps they pay $1M as well. As soon as the cost is more than the benefit, all of a sudden we realise that we don't really need 100 differnt people to sign off on everything.
Another easy win in this example would just be to make more of it electronic e.g. you apply in one place and they send out the relevant permissions to the various departments, some of whom could fill them in immediately/automatically and wire them back.
I don't understand why this is phrased as incredulous. Are there countries where this isn't the case? Just because you own the land -which you don't, you merely have a title that grants you the exclusive, but limited, usage rights of that land- does not mean you are free to just build whatever you want?
That said, Indian paperwork is famous for being Futurama levels of bureaucracy with Balkan levels of bribery. It's why giant corporations just don't bother with India, and why small store owners just don't even bother: just run your business until they crack down, which they won't as long as you keep a low profile.
Yeah think again.
Are there any countries where this isn't true? Where you can just build whatever you want on your own land with your own money?
British colonialism & its continued degeneration under Nehru's acolytes made sure that India would never ever rise again. What a tragedy.
It's amusing that my countrymen consider the Indian state legitimate at all - it's only agenda seems to be the destruction of the classical Indian civilization, together with all its inheritence (language, tradition, 'religion' ...).
Looks like the author wants to use land demarcated for agricultural use to build a factory.
That is a whole new story. In many cities, there are industrial development centers and you can buy land there and build a manufacturing facility easily.(The very fact that the govt. sold/leased you land in that zone means a lot of environmental and industrial clearances are de-facto fulfilled)
GBooks link: https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Mystery_of_Capital/...
I wonder what it would take to digitize this whole process, so that a single application can trigger all the relevant approval requests, and the overall status can be tracked -- both by the applicant, and at the systemic level to see whether certain departments become (cough) bottlenecks.
Not as frustrating as what OP described. Still. Simple Administrative formality can fuck up your plan badly.
CF a fine piece of self reflection on our own adminstration. ( I love our admin, it's a fine piece of Napoleonic technology. But. yah. ) https://youtu.be/JtEkUmYecnk?t=34
Given "bribe" was mentioned 39 times in the article.. Good luck!
Over a period of 5-6 years, I brushed up with so much corruption that it sickens me to the core. I tried approaching the ACB(anti-corruption-bureau), and faced even more harassment. I believe their job is to protect corrupt officers who pay dues to their higher ups. And the supreme leaders are changing rules that are empowering such corrupt officers. If we talk about it to public - we are termed anti-nationals.
I grew up with "real goons and mafia" when I was a kid, but even those guys had better ethics relative to what most govt officers exhibit today.
In India, I used to have mild panic attacks when my mobile rang. I had sleepless nights and my work suffered so much.
I left India with my business just recently and came to UAE (because it was the shortest path). The freedom from stress was so good that I slept like a baby for a few days. (And I am an Hindu for the record). The only worry I have here is higher cost of living which leaves less savings, but I make enough. I have so much invested in India that I want to sell off, but I do not want to go back even for a moment. I have extended family back there, but I don't want to see them.
There are a few things I've realised over the past 20 years, and more so in the past 8 years. I may be wrong - but this is what I think, based on my own experiences:
1. GST is a HUGE RISK to any business in India. There are some businesses that actually benefit from GST - but they deal with "arbitrary ruling risk". Then there are other bureaucratic departments. India's GST was not successful in doing "one-nation-one-tax", but it became successful in bringing multiple levels of corruption and goonism together.
2. All taxation and govt departments are departments of white-collar greedy goons. No matter what people say about part of the system being corrupt. They are all corrupt goons because they work in unison.
3. Corruption in India is not like "some bad fish in water", but it is like a "glass of highly toxic liquid that has contaminated the container". Even if you put in multiple glasses of "clean water", the system stays "toxic" - you basically need to replace the container completely. And that really requires a big breaking change - which people of India will not support.
4. Indian govt officers (even the clerks) think of private Indian citizens as "slaves" and use divide-and-counquer policies. If we think India is a democracy, think again. The supreme "elected" leaders cannot do a lot, because they need them.
All the land in India is agricultural by default. Except in some desert states.