NEW DELHI: By April 2015, starting a new business in India would no longer require budding entrepreneurs to make multiple trips to myriad government offices, with the Narendra Modi government moving to an online approval system for more than 200 permits required by different industries from central and state government departments.The new system for registering and seeking clearances for any business would allow entrepreneurs to apply for and track the status of all permits and licences online to start with, and eventually on mobile phones, in line with PM Modi’s vision of bringing governance to people’s fingertips.This initiative could be highlighted when Cabinet Secretary Ajit Seth meets India Inc on Friday with the commerce and industry secretaries to discuss measures to improve the ease of doing business. India is currently ranked 142nd on the World Bank’s index for this and the government is committed to improve this to 50.Promising to simplify business processes and regulations in six months, the PM had told US businesses in October: “Whatever may have been India’s ranking on the ease of doing business index, I have now told officials that I don’t want to be so low on this ranking.”PM Modi told US businesses in October that he had given officials “specific parameters to improve quickly”.While the Modi administration has stoked a revival in investor interest in India, foreign investors spooked by policy uncertainties and the country’s notorious red tape are still looking for tangible signs of change in the business environment. This initiative could be a key enabler in changing the narrative, feel experts.“The cabinet secretariat is prodding all ministries and state governments to complete the exercise by March 2015, so that anyone setting up a new venture in any sector or state can apply for the requisite permits and even pay fees online,” said a senior government official aware of the development.The proposed national portal for registrations and clearances would also free up entrepreneurs from the guesswork associated with seeking clearances in India’s cumbersome and uncertain bureaucratic landscape, a system that spawns brokers and agents who charge for helping out aspiring businessmen.“There will be a start-up matrix on the portal that will tell applicants what permissions are needed for which sectors. So if you are about to set up a pharma unit in Gujarat, it will tell you what are the permits needed from the health ministry and the state government,” the official explained.As of now, 81 state-level clearances, including those relating to acquiring land, setting up a factory and associated nods such as registering a boiler and operating a diesel genset are being digitised.Another 133 clearances granted by different central ministries and departments, including tricky security nods from the home and defence ministries, will also be put online. More than 50 of these central clearances pertain to the railway ministry alone.“Moving to an online system for granting clearances is a good start, after years of creating multiple single windows for investors that only sent them to other official windows,” said former Boston Consulting Group chairman and Planning Commission member Arun Maira. “But it’s equally important to re-engineer the processes involved in the clearances and create an intelligent back end. If people using the new system have a bad first experience and throw their hands up saying even this doesn’t work, it could backfire,” he told ET, stressing the importance of doing things in the right order.Under the new system, entrepreneurs would be able to track their applications digitally and would be informed any time there is an inter-departmental consultation on their file, through the portal being developed by the cabinet secretariat with the National Informatics Centre.In pharmaceuticals, for instance, the health ministry’s different approvals for new drugs and clinical trials, import and export of drugs and pricing approvals for generic drugs would be accessible online.While a similar initiative was launched by the industry ministry with software company Infosys Technologies five years ago, it has so far digitised only two permissions granted by its own department — industrial licences and industrial entrepreneur memoranda.The Department of Industrial Policy & Promotion grants three other licences — for using explosives, gas cylinders and import and storage of petroleum products. These are now being put online at the behest of the cabinet secretariat, which has been mapping the multiple clearances required for different sectors with the help of industry groupings such as Ficci in recent months.The Modi administration has already put in place a system for online filing and tracking of environmental and forest clearance applications, as opaque and tardy green clearances were among the biggest irritants flagged by corporate India in recent years. “When we started this process, we had identified 60-odd central and state permissions that could be digitised. But after talking to industry and states, the number has crossed 200,” said another official involved in the exercise, who said most ministries are likely to complete the digital shift as early as February 2015.The various ministries taking their permissions online include finance (from allotment of tax numbers to permitting external commercial borrowings), commerce (export import licences), corporate affairs, labour, power, road transport, agriculture, shipping, water resources and petroleum and natural gas.Even the culture ministry has been roped in, said an official who didn’t want to be identified. Approvals, for instance, are required from the Archaeological Survey of India and Heritage Conservation Committee at the Centre for projects coming up near ancient monuments or heritage buildings.