Plain-English guides to registering, running and staying compliant as a business in India.
Creating a seller account on the Government e-Marketplace (GeM) is only the first step. Before a government buyer can place an order with you, you have to complete your profile, list what you sell (or get authorised to sell a brand), and, once orders come, follow the delivery and acceptance steps that trigger payment. Most
Which FSSAI category you need depends mainly on your annual turnover, with some kinds of business pushed into a higher category regardless of turnover. From 1 April 2026, FSSAI applies these turnover limits to new applications: Category Annual turnover (from 1 April 2026) Limit before 1 April 2026 Issued by Basic registration Up to ₹1.5
Yes. Indian company law has no nationality requirement for directors, so a foreign national or an NRI can sit on the board of an Indian private limited company. There are three conditions to plan around: the person needs a Director Identification Number (DIN), their documents must be attested in the form the MCA accepts, and
The board of a new company must appoint its first statutory auditor within 30 days of the date of registration. If the board fails to, it must tell the members, who then appoint the auditor at an extraordinary general meeting within 90 days. Either way, this first auditor holds office only until the end of
The moment a business hires its first employee, it takes on a set of obligations that run every month for as long as anyone is on payroll. Most of them are not difficult. What makes employer compliance hard is that the obligations come from different laws, are run by different authorities and fall due on
Director KYC is no longer a yearly chore. From 31 March 2026, the Ministry of Corporate Affairs replaced the annual DIR-3 KYC with a single form, DIR-3 KYC Web, filed once in every three-year cycle, by 30 June. Separately, any change in your personal mobile number, email or residential address now has to be reported
If your NGO will carry out CSR projects on behalf of a company, it must be registered with the Central Government on Form CSR-1 first. The requirement has applied since 1 April 2021 and comes from rule 4(2) of the Companies (Corporate Social Responsibility Policy) Rules, 2014. Without a CSR registration number, a company cannot
A sole proprietorship cannot be converted into a company by filing a form. In law, a proprietorship is just you trading under a name, so there is no entity to convert. What people call “conversion” is two steps: incorporate a new private limited company, then transfer the proprietorship’s business into it. The company buys or
The MCA rejects a proposed company name for one of three reasons: it is too close to a name already on the register, it is “undesirable” under the incorporation rules, or it uses a restricted word without approval. Most rejections are the first kind, and most of them could have been avoided with ten minutes
A Class 3 Digital Signature Certificate (DSC) is the electronic signature most Indian government portals expect from a business. Directors sign MCA forms with it, companies and LLPs verify GST filings with it, companies sign income-tax returns with it, and bidders sign e-tenders with it. Since the Controller of Certifying Authorities (CCA) stopped allowing standalone
