Last month, I was invited to speak at an industry gathering where the presentations flanking mine fixated on a familiar obsession of tax minutiae and the "ease of doing business."

Having sat through countless such panels, I was struck once again by a perennial truth.

Indian businesses still expend a staggering amount of capital and caloric energy simply battling the regulatory system.

"Ease of doing business" has become a rhetorical catch-all to describe the bureaucratic agony of enterprise in India and the piecemeal efforts to relieve it.

And looking back on decades of reform promises, one wonders if we will ever reach a point where commerce feels genuinely unimpeded.

India’s Regulatory Maze

India famously climbed to 63rd place in the World Bank’s 2019 Doing Business rankings, up from 142 in 2014.

We don’t have a ranking after that because the Bank scrapped the index entirely amidst data irregularities and ethical scandals.

Yet, much like India’s headline GDP numbers, the corporate reality on the ground rarely aligns with the optimism of the metrics.

Consider the regulatory thicket. A TeamLease Reg Tech study two years ago calculated that India Inc must navigate a labyrinth of 1,536 acts, 69,233 compliances, and 6,618 annual filings.

While no single company bears the entire brunt, the exact load varies by geography, sector, and headcount, the aggregate burden remains suffocating.

Labor regulations alone account for nearly half of all compliance requirements and, alarmingly, 68% of the provisions that carry imprisonment clauses.

Even when the state manages to streamline one set of rules, as it has in the last two years, a new hydra inevitably emerges elsewhere, often within or around the tax codes.

The competencies required to manage this friction shift, but the total burden rarely diminishes.

This reality prompts a necessary question: Is it time to move the goalposts?

Rethinking India’s Investment Pitch

In an interview I conducted last week in Mumbai, Jahangir Aziz, Co-Head of Macroeconomic Research at JP Morgan, suggested exactly that.

For thirty years, India has tried to improve the ease of doing business, and it frankly hasn't eased much.

Why, he asked, should we continue fighting a battle that is structurally hostile to victory?

Instead, Aziz argues, India must pivot from pitching itself as the cheapest or easiest place to do business to positioning itself as the safest.

The guiding principle of global capital allocation has profoundly shifted over the last five years.

Multinational corporations and investors are no longer chasing marginal cost arbitrage; they are deploying trillions to secure supply chain resilience, he says.

Aziz noted that JP Morgan alone wields a $1.5 trillion loan book to promote security and resiliency, alongside $10 billion of its own capital invested in companies advancing those exact goals.

The Case For Resilience

The vulnerabilities of the old model are glaring.

India’s pharmaceutical industry, a massive global exporter of generic drugs, remains perilously dependent on Chinese active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs).

If Beijing halts exports, the Indian drug sector collapses.

Global investors are now willing to pay a premium to mitigate this kind of geopolitical and operational risk.

This does not mean we abandon the crusade for simpler industrial policies or a rationalised tax code.

But we must recognise that genuine ease of doing business will evolve at a glacial pace.

In the interim, our immediate focus as Aziz says, must be on offering global capital the one asset it currently values above all else: a sanctuary of safety and resilience.