NEW DELHI: It usually takes five days to register a company in India, but for Wiziwig Learnings and Parnasa Mediworld it was a one-day affair.And it wasn't just the two of them. Two other companies were also incorporated in a day, marking the successful launch of a pilot project by the ministry of corporate affairs in Delhi. Since Thursday, when the pilot was launched, 28 company secretaries are huddled in the ministry of corporate affairs' conference room in the capital's Shastri Bhawan along with a couple of officials and some executives from Infosys, trying to ensure that companies can be registered within a day. Over the next few weeks, as the system stabilizes, anyone would be able to register a company in a day as the government moves to centralised processing of incorporation proposals at a new centre in Manesar (near Gurgaon), instead of doing it with the Registrar of Companies (RoC). The World Bank's Ease of Doing Business rankings estimated last year that, on an average, it took two-seven days to reserve the name for a company and another five days to complete the incorporation formalities. "If you were unlucky, it could take more than a year to get the name approved," admitted an officer.Since the end of January, the ministry of corporate affairs has crunched the time taken to select the name to one working day. It involved re-engineering the process and moving to an automated system, which is far less time consuming than doing it manually. In addition, automation has helped reduced the number of rules from 39 to 26 steps.The result: in one month, 14,000 applications were processed. On an average, 70% of the applications are cleared within a day and the remaining 30% are given an additional time to resubmit as the names suggested by them are not acceptable. "But everyone gets to know within one working day if their application has been accepted or not. There is zero balance from Tuesdays-Fridays while there may be some additional work on Mondays due to applications filed on Fridays," said an official. Now the stage is set to move to the second stage and turn the name selection exercise and the incorporation process into a one-day exercise.By the end of the June quarter, MCA will release a new form, which will crunch the entire process into one. Even if you have not pre-selected the name, you can register and the memorandum of association will be generated. The ministry has signed a contract with Infosys which stipulates clear timelines and a penalty for delays.