Paper to Cloud: Digitizing the Government-to-Business (G2B) interface in Tamil Nadu, India

The State of Tamil Nadu, India has consistently been ranked as a high-performing state, with the highest number of manufacturing factories/ clusters, Special Economic Zones, exports, investment potential, as well as socio-economic indicators. Despite the positive growth story, businesses had pointed to challenges in obtaining business licenses. The prevalence of physical touchpoints, lack of systematic coordination between agencies, absence of robust legislation, information asymmetry on procedures, lack of enforceable timelines, and effective aftercare mechanisms, stymied the State from realizing the true economic potential. To enhance the business climate in the State, a series of reforms built around the digitization of the G2B interface through the ‘Tamil Nadu Single Window Portal’ was initiated in 2017-18. This short paper attempts to delineate factors that enabled the successful implementation of this dedicated G2B platform, and highlights the reform process, initiatives, impact on businesses / economy and transferable learnings from this transformation journey.