Push to enhance ease of doing business: Govt vendor payments to be cleared in 3 days

New Delhi: All government vendors and contractors will start getting their payments cleared within three working days starting August, said people familiar with the matter.

Towards this, the finance ministry has asked all ministries and departments to fully switch to electronic bill processing, replacing paper, the people said.

The move is in line with the government's broader push to enhance ease of doing business and reduce payment delays in larger government contracts, especially in infrastructure and service procurement.


The Department of Expenditure issued an advisory last month to all ministries and departments asking them to prepare for full migration to the e-bill platform by strengthening internal controls and digital record-keeping, doing away with manual bills.

"We are ready with the system to fully switch to e- bills, and all the manual bills will be discontinued," a senior official told ET.

Several ministries and departments have already made the switch, and the rest will complete the process by the month-end, the official said.

With this, the government aims to move to end-to-end digital processing of expenditure, replacing paper-based approvals, with system-driven workflows and audit trails.

As part of the upgraded digital framework, each payment claim will now carry an automatically system generated reference number embedded on supporting documents at the time of creation, improving its traceability and reducing the scope for manual errors or duplicate processing.