Manish Sabharwal On India's Regulatory Cholesterol | Ep 11 | Growth Is Good

Our guest for this episode is an employer who went beyond merely railing about the excessive compliances that Indian businesses must put up with. Manish Sabharwal, Vice-Chairman at TeamLease RegTech, remembers the number by heart – 26,134 – the number of different reasons an Indian employer can be put in jail. So do so many people from the industry, academia, and the government. ‘Jailed for Doing Business’, a 2022 report by TeamLease and the Observer Research Foundation (ORF), was the kind of seminal document that brought home the exact scale of India’s regulatory cholesterol, which inhibits innovation and entrepreneurship at every stage of a business’s life cycle. In this hour-long conversation with FED Director Rahul Ahluwalia, Sabharwal admits that his earlier attempts at influencing policy outcomes for the Indian industry were overly philosophical. “But reform only happens when you make your ask specific, finite and actionable,” he says in this episode. Sabharwal has many actionable asks. They all circle back to shedding our regulatory weight, cutting down on bureaucratic excesses, and turning India into a lean and mean administrative machine that empowers businesses instead of limiting them. “The job of the government is not to set things on fire. It is to create the conditions for spontaneous combustion.” Episode chapters - (00:00) - Terrorism & jobs: growing up in Kashmir (12:20) - India's persistent 'regulatory cholesterol' (23:15) - Is it becoming more difficult to advocate for economic growth? (30:40) - India's inefficient welfare state (43:30) - Politics vs economics (51:10) - GDP growth for geopolitics and defence Follow us on Twitter: https://x.com/fedev_india