E-consultation facility to fast-track policy decisions on corporate laws

Policy decisions on India’s corporate laws are set to get fast-tracked with the e-consultation facility under the latest version of the ministry of corporate affairs’ (MCA) digital portal, MCA21 V3.

The facility, which allows comments on draft laws to be submitted directly on the updated MCA website, would provide policy makers with an immediate analysis of public sentiment and feedback compared to over a month’s time earlier, a government official said.

Powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning, the newly implemented technology would enable expedited and precise recalibrations to proposed laws or amendments, they said.


While no new draft papers have been put out yet since the new portal was launched on May 24, the ministry tested the e-consultation module by feeding in comments on past draft papers.

“The e-consultation module gave us in-depth sentiment analysis of the feedback, down to each section of the papers, within three days. Usually, this process used to take over a month to do manually,” the official said.

An additional feature of the module would be the ability to identify similar feedback and club them into a single category.

This would prevent policy makers from having to comb through ‘copy paste’ comments, the official said, adding that the ministry had to go through each of 20,000 comments that turned out to be the same, in a previous incident.

Apart from the e-consultation module, phase one of MCA21 V3 also included an e-book facility that brought all corporate laws, rules and guidelines and Indian accounting standards in one place.

The updated website also reduced the need for attachments with the implementation of web-based forms for compliance including a pre-fill feature based on previous corporate filings.

The second and more comprehensive phase of the new portal would be rolled out from October and would have a range of features such as e-adjudication and compliance management system along with a mobile app.