How Indian Bureaucracy Slows Down Investments By NRIs
- By Professor Prabhu Guptara
- Published 03/21/2008
Professor Prabhu Guptara
Professor Prabhu Guptara is Executive Director, Organisational Development, Wolfsberg (a subsidiary of UBS - one of the largest banks in the world). He is also Freeman of the City of London and of the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists, and Chartered Fellow of the of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development; he is also Fellow: of the Institute of Directors, of the Royal Commonwealth Society, and of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of the Arts Commerce and Manufactures; and he continues to supervise PhD research at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland) as well as to be Visiting Professor at various Universities and Business Schools around the world.
Earlier roles include: a Governor of the Polytechnic of Central London, Member of the Council of the British Institute of Management, of the International Federation of Training & Development Organisations (IFTDO), of the Association for Management Education and Development (UK), of the South East Regional Council of the Confederation of British Industry.
Judge, 1988 National Training Awards, 1980 Commonwealth Poetry Prize, 1990 & 1991 Deo Gloria Prize for Fiction; Chair of the Panel of Judges, Deo Gloria Prize 1992 & 1993.
Experience with an enormous range of organisations including: Akzo Nobel (Netherlands), the Associated Banks Institute (Germany), Barclays Bank (UK), British Petroleum (UK), the Council of Europe, Cultor (Finland), Deutsche Bank (Germany), Groupe Bull (France), Federation of Finnish Engineers (Finland), the International Management Association of Japan, Kemira (Finland), Kraft Jakob Suchard (Switzerland), Leadership Academy (Finland), Nokia Telecommunications (Finland), Novo Nordisk (Denmark), Sedgwick International Insurance and Reinsurance Brokers (UK), Singapore Institute of Management, Sonatrach (Algeria), Sun Alliance (UK), UNCTAD, Valeo (France), and so on.
Organiser, chair and lecturer by invitation for numerous international conferences, he has contributed widely to radio and television in the UK and other countries (The Money Program, Any Questions) and has written for Financial Times (London, UK), The Guardian, The Times and other publications; articles, for example, in The Gower Handbook of Management, The Gower Handbook of Quality, and the International Encyclopedia of Business & Management (Routledge).
A CD-ROM has been issued of his lecture at the Professorenforum, University of Zurich, titled "Making the World Better - Why it does NOT happen...and what TO DO about it"
Further information available from rbadertscher@coba.ch
His best-known research publication is "Top Executives in the Global 100 Companies and their IT-Competence" (ADVANCE: Management Training Ltd., UK, and Wolfsberg Executive Development Centre, Switzerland, 1998); and he is included in Debrett's People of Today and in Who's Who in the World. Professor Prabhu Guptara lives in Switzerland.
A friend of mine has just decided to make an investment in India, which will result in his becoming a Director of this (at present, rather tiny) company.
In order to actually achieve this, however, apparently he has to take the following steps:
1) A colour photocopy of his passport needs to be made.
2) This should be taken to the Indian Embassy for affixing the signature and seal of the concerned officials (even in a small country such as Switzerland, this can take up a whole day or even more if one includes waiting time at the Embassy)
3) The photocopy then needs to be notarized by a local solicitor.
4) This document should then be couriered to the Expat Office in Bangalore where it would be used to apply for his Director Identification Number (DIN).
5) On applying, an application form would be generated and this would be couriered back to him.
6) On receiving this application form by courier you would need to sign at pre-designated places on the form and courier the form back to us at the Bangalore Office.
7) This form would then be submitted to the Registrar of Companies and his DIN would be allotted (on payment of the necessary fees).
In most countries, it would be either step 2 or step 3 (asking for step 3 after step 2 is tantamount to saying that the Indian government does not trust its own Embassies!). Here a simple change, asking for items 2 OR 3, instead of both 2 AND 3, would make life easier for investors.
Sequencing items 5-7 AFTER items 1-4 simply slows down the process. If the form (item 6) were issued at the start of the process, then the whole caboodle would be shortened. That would be a very useful second change in the procedure.
So two simple changes would make life simpler and easier for NRI investors and not change anything in terms of the information required by the government.
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Prabhu Gupta
