Page 29 - Digital India Awards 2022 - Compendium

Digital Initiatives for Ease of Doing Business

Invest Punjab

https://pbindustries.gov.in

Project Team
Initiative Lead: Members:
Sibin C Vivek Verma Anoop Kumar Vishav Bandhu Navinder Kumar
Director Industries & Deputy Director Jalali Joint Director Sharma
Commerce, Department of General Sr. Director (IT) Department of Deputy Director (IT)
Industries & Commerce NIC NIC Industries & Commerce NIC

Business First is a user-friendly state of the
art portal to facilitate new and existing
investors to obtain Regulatory Clearances &
Fiscal Incentives for setting up and running
businesses in the State of Punjab. Business First
ensures world class facilitation to the investors,
right from conceptualization of the project till
commencement of commercial operations and
thereafter Renewals and Fiscal Incentives. Taking
forward the Ease of Doing Business Campaign

under Digital India Initiative, envisioned by Hon’ble Prime Minister, Government of Punjab has brought all
stakeholder departments and investors on the single platform with role based Smart Dashboards.

Business First portal has become the backbone of Ease of Doing Business in Punjab. More than 26 Departments
are on board with more than 100 Regulatory Clearances and 36 Fiscal Incentives. It has played a vital role in
upgrading EoDB Ranking of the state and Punjab has achieved “Top Achiever” category in EoDB Ranking.

Using the Business First portal, stakeholder departments have processed more than 1.15 Lac applications. It has
attracted proposed investment of 3,99,560 Crore and generated an employment of 9,52,070. Various states like
Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Odisha, Haryana, Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and
Bihar have visited Punjab to study the successful model of Invest Punjab and Business First. NIC Business First
Team has helped State of Haryana, UT of Chandigarh and Daman & Diu for replicating similar portals at their
end.
Still we are not settling there. Using Data Analytics and a dataset of the last 3 years, the team has prepared a
new Checklist Based Scrutiny Engine in the first phase. This has brought standardization and transparency in
scrutiny of applications all over the State. In the second phase we are working on AI based algorithms which
can predict Grant/Rejection of Approvals/Applications in near future.