Invest India’s policy tool to help investors navigate state rules

Invest India is building a tool called I-chat policy with an idea to incorporate the policies and regulations of India's 28 states and make them available to investors through a common platform. It will soon add details of union territories as well.

"This has been rolled out as a pilot internally. But the larger goal is to enhance the ease of doing business for an investor," Invest India chief Nivruti Rai told ET.

"Investors can come and say I'm going to invest in automotive tyres; show me the incentives from different states. It will make the list table of, say, five states and say these are the policies," she explained.

And it will not just be for use in India, Rai said, adding that plans were afoot to work with Brazil and a few other countries to incorporate their policies and train the model to compare policies across countries as well.

The platform which has been developed in partnership with a startup is also going to be used internally and that every month, the organisation would publish the sectors that are important which are driving investments.

"We intend to work with Brazil and a few other countries to incorporate their policies and train the model to compare policies across countries. So Brazil can use it for Brazil, but Brazil can also use it in comparison to India, Malaysia, whichever country's policies we put in. India is going to catapult on the shoulder of technology. And we will use every single technology," she said.

In an exclusive interaction with ET last week, Rai had said that Invest India has big plans for India's digital public infrastructure. While she did not share details about the same, she said that the governance infrastructure for payments has enabled business innovation at the grassroots level.

"We are looking at the nations who are seeking our help, and we are seeing requests coming in from nations not just for digital but physical infrastructure as well, interestingly," she said.

She also mentioned that Invest India has started work on what is called India’s landing platform wherein if say a shoe company wants to come into India, they would not just want the land but would expect to have an understanding of the entire end-to-end system.

"They want to know where the leather or buckles will come from, if there are logistics available to bring people, where they can get their food from, and where the polish or embroidery can be done. We will have the entire supply chain mapped. And in the end, we can plot India as a map and show where the sector’s suppliers are clustered, and also which are building towards that," Rai said.