In the early 2010s, doing business in India felt like a hurdle race where the hurdles were raised mid-sprint. Do you know India once ranked an abysmal 184 out of 190 countries just to get a construction permit?

Do you know it took 186 days, over six months of bureaucratic purgatory, not to build anything, not to create jobs, but merely to get permission? This was not accidental. It was the cumulative weight of decades of regulatory excess, inherited controls, and a deep mistrust of enterprise.

Undoing that damage did not happen overnight. It took 11 years of sustained, often unglamorous reform to dismantle what had been layered over generations.

But 2025 stands apart.

This year, India moved from easing business to freeing business. If 1991 was the year of liberalisation, then 2025 is the year of deregulation. If 1991 gave India its “animal spirits,” 2025 has finally given those spirits a cage-free environment.

Breaking the “Dwarf” Cycle

For decades, Indian firms stayed small by design. Not because of weak ambition, but because growth triggered punishment. Hiring the 10th, 20th, or 100th worker often meant crossing invisible regulatory tripwires buried inside nearly 29 central labour laws. Expansion brought scrutiny, inspectors, and legal risk. The rational response was to remain a “dwarf.”

That psychology finally broke in 2025.

The government raised the turnover threshold for “small companies” tenfold to ₹100 crore, decisively removing the incentive to artificially cap growth. At the same time, dozens of overlapping labour statutes were consolidated into four simplified labour codes, replacing uncertainty with........

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