At the recent Invest Karnataka 2016 in Bengaluru, Chief Minister Siddaramaiah went all out to showcase the State as the best place to do business and invest in. The ground reality, however, is different.

Chipmaker Intel wanted to invest $150 million (about ₹1,000 crore) to construct its third building in Bengaluru, its largest in India, with capacity for 3,000 employees and a large R&D laboratory. But it took the company 18 months to just figure out where to go for all the approvals, and then to get them.

Speaking to BusinessLine , Intel India President Kumud Srinivasan said: “It took us about 18 months to get permits — the no-objection certificate took the longest. One of the things that took a long time was over who would give which permits. We need to see a significant reduction in that. We also have asked for a single-window clearance.”

Intel now wants to construct its fourth building in the same campus in Bengaluru, but it would rather wait for the policy regime to improve.

“We are looking at the possibility… but we are looking to get some ease of doing business and infrastructure requirements from the government,” Srinivasan said.

Last October, Union Urban Development Minister M Venkaiah Naidu told BusinessLine that the Centre was working on streamlining construction approvals and instituting a single-window clearance mechanism.

But the task is a lot more complex than it sounds. Construction approvals involve multiple ministries: Civil Aviation, Environment & Forests and Climate Change, Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation, Civil Aviation, Culture, Defence and Consumer Affairs. While the Centre is engaging with all these ministries to come out with a single-window clearance mechanism, that has not happened, impacting India’s ranking in the ease of doing business.

Hurdles galore

According to World Bank data on ease of doing business in 2015, India ranks 142 out of 189 economies. Under the subhead of ‘Dealing with construction permits’, it ranks 184 out of 189 economies. The Centre aims to ensure all approvals are through within 30 days from the date of application.

For companies such as Intel, involved in high-level R&D work, there are other areas that need to be addressed.

For example, an essential part of any tech-oriented R&D organisation is to quickly ship electronic components in and out of the country to be a part of a global supply chain. The fastest way to do this is to hand-carry components. “Today, India is one of the few countries that does not allow electronic components to be hand-carried. That means that our throughput time for getting a part and then sending it back becomes much longer,” she said.

Srinivasan has been trying to make India Intel’s R&D hub. But challenges in the ease of doing business remain an obstacle.

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