"ADOPT BEST GLOBAL PRACTICES" — HERE IS THE LIST, SIR. AND IT POINTS TO ONE WORD: SPEED
An Open Letter to the Hon'ble Prime Minister — on the One China Practice India Can Adopt This Year, At Zero Cost
Hemen Parekh | 18 June 2026 (First proposed: 20 September 2015 — see prior art below)
( 0 ) A HEARTFELT THANK YOU
Before a word of my own, my sincere and heartfelt thanks to Shri Anant Goenka, President of FICCI (2025–26) and Vice Chairman of the RPG Group, for so sharply focusing the national spotlight on the best practices of China — and on the uncomfortable mirror they hold up to our own pace of doing business.
( anant.goenka@rpg.in | anant.goenka@gmail.com )
It is rare for an industry leader to name our weakness as plainly as our strength. He has done the nation a service by asking the right question. This blog is simply my attempt to answer it — with a benchmark, a clock, and a decade-old piece of prior art.
( A ) THE PRIME MINISTER'S OWN BRIEF
For more than a decade, the Prime Minister has urged industry — and governments, Central and State — to "adopt the best global practices." At the 5th National Conference of Chief Secretaries (Dec 2025), and again at the NITI Aayog Governing Council (11 June 2026), he pressed every State to fix measurable 100-day and five-year targets, stressing that ease of doing business decides where investment lands.
So let us take him at his word — and table the list.
( B ) THE CHINA LIST — What Actually Powered The Rise
A recent commentary, "How India Can Win in a Rewired Global Economy" (The Economic Times), set out — with rare honesty — the levers behind China's ascent:
- A quantified national mission ("Made in China 2025") — ten priority sectors, each weakness named, each gap given a targeted measure.
- National purpose woven into work — citizens and companies voluntarily align with state priorities.
- Intra-government competition — Beijing sets the goal; provinces and cities then compete with near-free land, cheap loans and fast-track approvals.
- Ecosystems, not champions — whole industrial districts, co-located, plug-and-play.
- People power — talent repatriation, millions of STEM graduates, a relentless work culture.
- R&D as a weapon — 2.7% of GDP and rising, versus India's 0.7%.
Items 1, 2, 5 and 6 will take us a generation to match. But items 3 and 4 — competitive, time-bound, single-desk clearance — we can adopt this very year. They need no subsidy. They need only a decision.
( C ) THE ONE PRACTICE WORTH BENCHMARKING — Time To Approval
Here is the heart of it. Let us compare, plainly, how long it takes to clear a project:
| Jurisdiction | The Clock On A Project Approval |
|---|---|
| Singapore | The global benchmark. World Bank's Doing Business ranked it No. 1 for ~10 years (through 2016), No. 2 thereafter (2017–2020) — unbroken top-two for the entire life of the index. It never won on subsidies; it won on certainty and speed. |
| China — the fast lane | Hangzhou's Qiantang district structures permits to clear within half a day. Shenzhen's "1-hour innovation circle" lets a startup source components and prototype almost on the spot. |
| China — the irony | On the general construction-permit metric, China was once ranked 181st (≈336 days, 37 procedures). Its genius was not to fix everything — it was to build a fast corridor for priority investment. That is precisely the model India can copy. |
| India — the States (2015 promises) | Tamil Nadu: 30 days. Andhra Pradesh: 21 days. Telangana: 15 days (IT projects 12), with a ₹1,000/day fine on the delaying officer. Maharashtra: 7 days, failing which deemed approved. |
| India — today's reality | The National Single Window System now lists 686+ Central approvals and 7,498 State approvals across 32 Central Departments and 34 States. Real progress — but 7,498 State approvals is itself the disease. A single window over a thousand desks is still a thousand desks. |
The lesson writes itself: Singapore proved speed beats subsidy. China proved you don't need a fast country — you need a fast channel. And our own States, back in 2015, already promised 7-to-30-day clearances. The promises exist. The enforcement does not.
( D ) THE PRIOR THINKING — This Is Not New
Eleven years ago, in "From Single Window to Single Day?" (20 Sept 2015), I tracked this very race among the States, and asked the one question no Chief Minister has yet answered:
"Can we look forward to one Chief Minister announcing — 'We will clear all investment proposals in ONE DAY'?"
I was not dreaming. I had seen it done. In my L&T days, our VP–Planning Mohan Pherwani made a joint-venture presentation to the Singapore Development Authority in the morning, was shown plots in the afternoon — and by evening the hotel receptionist handed him a letter that confirmed the JV, allotted the chosen plot, and enclosed a cheque for Singapore's equity share. One day. One desk. Done.
I revisited all of this only days ago, prompted by Gujarat's fine new Viksit Gujarat Industrial Policy 2026 — see "A Global Best Practise? Here I Come" (16 June 2026): https://myblogepage.blogspot.com/2026/06/a-global-best-practise-here-i-come.html
The Gujarat policy is excellent. But notice what even our best policy competes on: the size of the cheque, not the speed of the clearance. Incentives are the easy part. Time-to-approval is the part investors lose sleep over.
( E ) THREE ASKS — Adopting The Best Practice, Exactly As Instructed
1. Pair every "Choose Your Incentive" with a "Choose Your Clock." A binding, published, audited maximum clearance time. A subsidy an investor may need; a fast clearance every investor needs.
2. Launch a "Single-Day Green Channel" on the Singapore SDA / China-zone model. Not for every project — but for pre-vetted, clean-compliance projects in notified estates: same-day, single-desk allotment-plus-approval. Let one Chief Minister plant the flag: "Cleared in ONE DAY."
3. Make delay personally costly — and approval automatic. Codify nationally what Telangana and Maharashtra glimpsed in 2015: beyond the published clock, the application stands deemed-approved, and the delay is logged against a named desk. Accountability is the cheapest reform there is.
( F ) WHY NOW
Three forces have aligned that never aligned before: a flagship State policy (Gujarat 2026) with the nation's attention; the Prime Minister's own standing mandate to adopt global best practice and set hard timelines; and a proven foreign template (Singapore) beside a proven domestic capability — we climbed from rank 142 (2014) to 63 (2020) on ease of doing business. When we decide to compress process, we move fast.
The recipe is complete. What remains is the decision.
The world has begun to conclude that "the next China is China." But India holds cards China cannot replicate — democratic legitimacy, the English-language advantage, the depth of our services, and, if we choose to deploy it, our entrepreneurial energy. The window is open. It will not stay open long.
You asked us to adopt the best global practice. The best of them all is the simplest: decide fast, and let the citizen build.
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Make Yourself Heard. Forward this — with your own improvements — to your State Industrial Department, NITI Aayog ( ceo-niti@nic.in ), and your Chief Minister's office. And do drop a word of thanks to Shri Anant Goenka ( anant.goenka@rpg.in ) for putting China's best practices squarely on the table.
— Hemen Parekh / www.hemenparekh.ai / IndiaAGI.ai
Note on sources: China's growth levers are drawn from "How India Can Win in a Rewired Global Economy," The Economic Times. Singapore and India ranking figures are from the World Bank's Doing Business series (retired 2021; successor "B-READY" pending fuller India sub-national data). State clearance promises (2015) are as recorded in my blog of 20 Sept 2015. NSWS approval counts are from nsws.gov.in (2026). Shri Anant Goenka took charge as FICCI President for 2025–26 at the chamber's 98th AGM, Nov 2025.
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