Comm min plans to bring its regional offices in Mumbai under one roof to improve efficiency

Mumbai: The Union Commerce and Industry Ministry is planning to bring various regional offices operating in Mumbai under one roof to improve efficiency, reduce administrative costs, and promote ease of doing business.

Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal on Friday held a comprehensive meeting with senior officials of various offices of the Ministry of Commerce and Industry operating here on the matter.

The meeting deliberated on ways to co-locate all these offices to enable greater coordination, seamless functioning and improved service delivery with a view to further promote ease of doing business and ease of living.


Goyal said that this transformation will help reduce administrative duplication, optimise shared infrastructure, and create a seamless one-stop ecosystem for exporters, MSMEs and startups.

"What we plan to do is to bring all the offices, wherever feasible, to one place," he told reporters here.

The ministry, he said, has about 20 offices of 12 organisations scattered at different places in the city.

"As a test case, the objective is co-location at a central point. All the offices of the different arms or departments or autonomous bodies related to the commerce ministry and industry at one location," he said.

These offices, he said, occupy lakhs of sq feet, worth several hundred crore rupees.

Because of this, "efficiency suffers as every office has its own housekeeping, security, and admin costs, which is pretty large," Goyal said.

He said large offices such as ECGC and the Indian Institute of Packaging would not be shifted, but organisations operating from smaller offices could be co-located.

At the proposed facility, the ministry plans to set up modern conferencing systems to enable businesses to interact with 46 different organisations of the ministry without having to move from one office to another.

It will help improve efficiency, bring down administration costs, increase productivity, and make life easier and simpler for businesses and common citizens, he added.

Regional offices of various arms of the ministry, including the Salt Commissioner's Organisation, Tea Board, ITPO and DGFT, are located in Mumbai.