Punjab’s digital governance push is beginning to alter the province’s administrative and economic landscape. At the centre of this shift is the e-Biz Portal, a unified digital platform intended to streamline business registration, licensing and regulatory approvals. While presented as a facilitation measure, the initiative reflects a broader attempt to recalibrate how the state interacts with businesses under the Punjab government’s IT-led reform agenda.

For decades, the cost of doing business was shaped not only by market conditions but also by procedural inefficiencies. Fragmented departmental systems, reliance on physical documentation, and repeated visits to government offices created delays and uncertainty, particularly for small and medium-sized enterprises. These frictions discouraged formalisation and added to compliance costs. The e-Biz initiative seeks to address these constraints by consolidating services on a single platform and replacing manual workflows with automated digital processes.

Through the portal, businesses can submit applications, upload documents, pay fees electronically and track approvals online. By integrating services across departments, the system reduces duplication and limits discretionary delays that have long undermined regulatory predictability. The stated objective is not digitisation alone, but a redesign of service delivery that treats regulatory compliance as a managed process rather than an administrative hurdle. A significant policy decision has reinforced this approach. From Feb 1, all services available on the e-Biz Portal will be offered online, eliminating the need for physical visits to........

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