VIJAYAWADA: The Comptroller & Auditor General of India (CAG) has said that the Single Desk Portal (SDP) established by the Andhra Pradesh government for making the approval process for industrial investment smoother needs to be streamlined further.In its Report No 4 of 2018, the CAG said that while the SDP “is useful to obtain approvals for the applications made by the entrepreneurs”, the “processing of applications for approvals and display of information requires the strengthening of systems”.This would “improve the performance of the portal and availability of information to the public”, the CAG says.“There are no validations to ensure second-stage (pre-operation) approvals are given only after ensuring all first first-stage (pre-establishment) approvals were given. In the SDP data, there were cases where the dates of receipt were before the dates of submission of applications. The Common Application Form (CAF) was not designed to collect the details of approvals already available with the entrepreneurs,” the report says.According to the CAG, the grievances of entrepreneurs were not being resolved even after the prescribed period of 30 days. “The portal does not display the updated status of approvals and also unit-wise details of applications received/approvals given. Information already available with other departments/agencies of the government was not integrated with the portal to strengthen the online processing of applications,” it says.The government had formulated the “Andhra Pradesh Single Desk Portal 2015” to provide the approvals required for starting and operating an industry within 21 working days at a single point using the information technology-enabled platform. The SDP was launched in April 2015 to put the policy into play.“As of 18 May 2017, a total number of 11,297 entrepreneurs had registered with the SDP since its launch in April 2015. As per the data furnished by the Commissioner of Industries , the portal received applications from 6,685 entrepreneurs for a total of 19,837 approvals. Out of the applications, the line departments gave 17,787 approvals, rejected/sent back 1,283 applications and 767 applications were under scrutiny as on 26 April 2017,” the report says.The report says that the data dump of the online approvals given contains “date sent” which is the date on which the registered entrepreneurs submitted information in the CAF in the portal and “date of receipt” which is the date on which the competent authority accessed the CAF through their login in the portal.“Audit analysis of SDP data pertaining to 802 (4%) out of the total 19,937 approvals given through SDP revealed that the date of receipt of application by the department concerned was one to 347 days prior to the date of sending of application by the applicant. Thus, there were no validations in the system to check that the dates were as per chronological vents and accept only valid inputs,” it says. The report adds that the government had said that the discrepancy in application-sent date was being fixed.Referring to grievance from entrepreneurs, the CAG says that since the SDP’s inception, the Commissionerate of Industries had received 50 grievances out of which 28 cases were yet to be resolved. “These were pending for a period ranging from 108 to 606 days. The pending grievances related mainly to the application process like permission for changing the CAF details, seeking guidance to apply online, etc.," it says.

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