The government in 2021 eased 79 “burdensome” compliances of the power sector under the Ease of Doing Business-Reducing Compliance Burden (EoDB-RCB) programme, which were affecting individual consumers and industry, an official statement said on Friday. The EoDB-RCB is a programme of the government to reduce the regulatory compliance burden on citizens and businesses.

It was focused on reducing compliances related to licences, certificates, permissions, renewals, inspections, returns, filings, registers, records, decriminalisation and involves assessment of regulations, including repeal of redundant laws, the Ministry of Power said in a statement.

The ministry also informed that it had started a fresh exercise in 2022 to ease compliances and prepared an action plan for the same, which would be implemented in two phases. The first phase would continue till March 31, 2022, while the second phase would continue till August 15, 2022.

“The government had launched a regulatory compliance portal (http://eodbrcp.dipp.gov.in), a Central online repository of all Central and State-level compliances to reduce the regulatory compliance burden of citizens and businesses. During 2021, the Ministry of Power had eased compliances related to 79 numbers of issues affecting the industry and consumer,” the statement said.

Listing a few significant steps taken by the organisations under it, the ministry said that the Bureau of Energy Efficiency (BEE) had simplified the implementation of the Standards & Labelling (S&L) programme. It had also introduced digitalisation and online tracking of the status of an application for manufacturers.

A helpdesk had also been created to resolve grievances of Designated Consumers (DCs). In the second phase of the Action Plan for 2022, BEE also planned to introduce QR code-based labels to strengthen star labelling and introduce online Reporting of Energy and Production related data under PAT (Perform, Achieve and Trade).