Plain-English guides to registering, running and staying compliant as a business in India.
Stay a sole proprietor while the business is small, low-risk and funded by you. Incorporate a private limited company when any one of these becomes true: you want a co-founder or investor to own part of it, the business is taking on debts or contracts big enough to threaten your personal assets, or the customers
If you want limited liability for a new Indian business, you will almost always end up choosing between three structures: a private limited company, a limited liability partnership (LLP) and a One Person Company (OPC). All three are registered with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA), all three keep your personal assets separate from the
A partnership deed should settle, in writing, the things partners most often fall out over: how profit is split, what each person puts in and takes out, who can sign for the firm, how decisions are made, and what happens when someone wants to leave, joins, dies or is pushed out. Where the deed says
Starting an NGO in India is a sequence, not a single registration. You form the organisation under one of three laws, give it a PAN and a bank account, then register it with the income tax department so its income is exempt and its donors can claim a deduction. Only after that do the funding-specific
NGO Darpan is a free online register of voluntary organisations run by NITI Aayog, with the software built by the National Informatics Centre. When an NGO signs up and its details are accepted, the portal generates a unique ID for it. That ID is how several government systems recognise the organisation: grant applications to central
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
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
