Lucknow: Having achieved a considerable progress in the 'Ease of Doing Business' by securing the second spot nationally in the implementation of Business Reforms Action Plan, the Uttar Pradesh government has initiated the process to reduce the regulatory compliance burden not only for businesses but citizen-centric services also.

The Department for Promotion of Industry & Internal Trade (DPIIT), Government of India in association with investment facilitation agency of the State - 'Invest UP' organised a workshop on 'Minimising the Regulatory Compliance Burden' and the objective of this programme was to minimise the regulatory compliance burden across the states based on defined compliance parameters such as renewals; inspection; register and records; display requirement; filings; decriminalisation and redundancy, etc. and to complete the exercise of repealing, merger, reduction or rationalisation of these compliances while minimising the physical touchpoints.

Nodal and sub-nodal officers of 40 departments of the state government participated in this interactive workshop that was held on Wednesday.

The Uttar Pradesh government has so far identified a total of 675 compliances to be reduced, out of which 195 compliances are to be reduced in phase-1 and 480 compliances in phase-2.

Additional Chief Secretary, Infrastructure and Industrial Development, Arvind Kumar said that besides further improving the ease of doing business for industries, the government was now focusing on citizen-centric services and compliances to improve the 'ease of living' as well.

He called upon the departments to work on this exercise on war-footing since Uttar Pradesh had been identified as one of the highest compliance burden states.

Invest India officials, representing DPIIT, informed that a dedicated portal has been launched for the states and their departments to identify and upload the compliances that could be reduced or minimized.

The portal will comprise a dash board for the Chief Secretary for direct review and monitoring. Technical aspects and procedure for identification of compliances to be reduced were explained to the Nodal officers in detail.

Secretary, Industrial Development and Chief Executive Officer, Invest UP, Neena Sharma said that around 120 compliances related to 26 departments had been already uploaded by Invest UP on the dedicated portal for reducing compliance burden.

The initiative has been divided into two phases -- first phase will end on March 31, 2021 and second phase will be up to August 15, 2021.

Each department will have to submit an action plan for identification and reducing of compliances along with evidence for ease of doing business as well as ease of living.