'Ease of doing business? What a joke': Indian MNC founder moves company HQ back to New York from Gujarat over 'corruption'

In the past decade, the Union government has taken several steps to improve ease of doing business in India.

In the last 5 years, India has improved by 79 ranks in EoDB rankings published by World Bank Group as Doing Business Report. India now ranks 63. However, the ground reality of it seems to be different.

As Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday chaired a meeting with his Council of Ministers discussing best practices to boost 'Ease of Doing Business', a Reddit post calling the ground reality "a living hell" is going viral.

The user, who claims to be an Indian co-founder of a multinational company originally based in New York, has written in a lengthy Reddit post that they shifted their operations to Gujarat hoping to benefit "immensely from lower labour costs, skilled talent, and a solid backend team."

The founder has now decided to move back to New York as the corruption and bureaucracy in India are a "living hell".

The user claimed, "Our business strictly exports products to multiple countries globally, we needed to get registered with the Customs office and a Customs House Agent (CHA). That is when the nightmare began."

They said the sheer amount of endless bureaucracy just to export products from India is "insane." "First, I applied for GST, and they demanded a mountain of documents. Then came opening the bank account, getting the IEC, AD code, Icegate registration—the list just kept going."

The user also claimed that they had to give a "five-digit" bribe to get a customs account open.

"But the extortion is never-ending. Now that we are exporting, a team member has to physically visit the local Customs House for every shipment. The officers there openly demand 3-digit cash bribes for every single parcel. If you refuse, they threaten to throw your shipment into secondary inspection," the founder further added.

In secondary inspection, the custom officials can legally hold your goods for 1 to 2 years without giving you a single answer. To save their businesses from ruin, every single exporter there just pays the bribe to clear their shipments, the user claimed.

"The headache of dealing with this constant corruption is unbearable. I have officially decided to pack up and move all of our operations back to New York, USA. Honestly, I would much rather pay high, honest salaries to American employees than give a single rupee in bribes to these corrupt Sarkari babus," the post read.

"Ease of doing business? What a joke. I am never doing business in India again," it added.

The post has garnered thousands of likes in two days sparking a debate over ease of doing business in India, with several users agreeing to the original post.

"Familiar with the story buddy. Had a start up in India back in the late 2000s. After 4 years of dealing with the Indian bureaucracy, I gave up and moved back to Chicago," commented a user.

Another shared the ordeal to get a car registered and wrote, "Man, I couldn’t even get my car registered. Went 4 times to RTO office with different resident proofs. Nope! 5k later, all documents were okay without even checking and I was good to go."