Steering Through India’s Complex Compliance Landscape: Rishi Agrawal, TeamLease RegTech

Compliance continues to be one of the toughest barriers to doing business in India, with companies grappling with thousands of laws, overlapping jurisdictions, and constant regulatory updates. In this exclusive conversation with Tech Achieve Media, Rishi Agrawal, CEO and Co-founder of TeamLease RegTech, explains why compliance remains a critical operational risk, what makes India’s regulatory framework uniquely challenging, and how technology-driven solutions like automation, AI, and RegTech platforms are helping enterprises transform compliance from a burden into a competitive advantage.

TAM: Why is compliance still one of the biggest barriers to doing business in India?

Rishi Agrawal: Compliance remains one of the biggest barriers to doing business in India because of its sheer complexity and the quantum of obligations. Today, companies have to navigate a pool of 1,536 Acts, more than 69,000 compliances, and over 6,600 filings spread across central, state, and local authorities. 

The challenge is made more difficult by the system’s fluidity. Thousands of government websites publish rules and notifications, resulting in over 10,000 regulatory updates annually. That is over 40 changes every single business day. Tracking, interpreting, and implementing these changes on time is difficult even for the most organised businesses. For smaller companies, the burden can be so high that many choose to remain small rather than grow formally and take on additional compliance costs.

Given the fact that most compliance processes are still manual, paper-based and people-dependent, businesses risk missed deadlines, penalties, reputational loss, or, in some cases, stalled operations. This is the reality that makes compliance one of the biggest operational risks in India.

While the government is moving in the right direction with reforms and efforts to simplify regulations, the friction of navigating India’s vast and changing compliance landscape remains. Technology is playing an important role in reducing this burden by digitising compliance management. 

TAM: What makes India’s regulatory landscape so complex compared to other markets?

Rishi Agrawal: India’s regulatory landscape is complex not only because of its scale but also due to its duplication, overlaps, and inconsistencies. Unlike many markets with centralised regulatory systems, India’s federal structure creates multiple layers of compliance- central, state, and local, often covering the same subject matter. This means a business may have to file the same information in different formats with different authorities, leading to redundancy and wasted effort.

Further, India still retains a large number of criminal penalties for procedural lapses. Missing a filing deadline or making an error in a register, which would attract administrative fines in most countries, can in India lead to prosecution or even jail time. This criminalisation of compliance adds significant risk for entrepreneurs and management, discouraging investment and innovation. Two of the five compliances carry provisions for imprisonment.

Multiple regulators also govern overlapping areas: labour laws, environmental clearances, taxation, corporate filings, and industry-specific norms often clash or replicate one another. The lack of harmonisation forces companies to maintain parallel processes for the same obligation, draining time and resources.

While reforms are underway and the government is moving toward rationalisation, the reality is that duplication and the entrenched hostility in the form of criminal liability for procedural lapses continue to make India one of the toughest regulatory environments in which to do business.

TAM: How does TeamLease RegTech’s SaaS platform simplify compliance for enterprises?

Rishi Agrawal: Businesses have to navigate requirements across central, state, and local levels, often facing redundancy in filings, registers, and disclosures. In many cases, even minor delays or lapses can invite penalties or, in some instances, criminal liability, making compliance one of the highest-stakes operational challenges for enterprises.

At TeamLease RegTech, we see this complexity every day. Tracking and managing compliance across labour, secretarial, tax, and industry-specific domains, among others, is a moving target that cannot be sustained through manual, paper-based systems. RegTrack, our tracking and management system, covers compliances across the law of the land to help organisations stay on the right side of the law.

Given that, solutions like RegAuto-Secretarial bring automation in secretarial functions: meeting management, document workflows, agenda, minutes, notices, etc. This helps improve productivity, accuracy and timeliness. For companies or practising Company Secretaries, this means less time spent on routine secretarial tasks, fewer errors and more reliable compliance. 

Similarly, RegAuto-Labour automates the generation of statutory returns, registers, challans and other labour-law obligations. Redundant manual steps are eliminated, timelines are more reliably met and accuracy improves significantly. It reduces the risk of missed filings or penalties due to human error.

Beyond automation, our Labour Compliance Services combine tech and domain expertise to deliver outstanding outcomes on the labour front. With a team of over 450 experts spread across India, smart dashboards, real-time tracking, secure data repositories, automated workflows, and strong access control, we ensure compliance tasks are not just done, but done right. This helps businesses avoid legal, financial, and reputational consequences and gives them greater visibility into compliance status and risk. 

Until India’s compliance ecosystem is simplified at its core, the challenges of duplication, criminality, and too many compliances will remain but technology, thoughtfully applied, can ease the friction and allow businesses to focus on growth.

TAM: What role do automation and AI play in real-time tracking of 3,700+ regulatory websites?

Rishi Agrawal: Automation and AI play a crucial role in real-time tracking of 3,700+ regulatory websites by continuously scanning government and regulatory portals, detecting amendments, new filings and policy changes without manual effort. Automation ensures immediate capture of updates, while AI technologies like Machine Learning and OCR interpret and classify the data across jurisdictions, categories and industries.

AI adds further intelligence by summarising regulatory changes for quick insights, offering contextual AI-driven help to guide users and enabling keyword-based intelligent document search to retrieve the right information instantly. Together, automation and AI transform vast, complex regulatory data into structured, actionable updates, reducing manual workload, minimising risks, and enabling timely compliance decisions.

TAM: How are new labour codes, DPDPA, and other policies reshaping compliance needs?

Rishi Agrawal: India’s compliance framework is in the middle of significant change. The labour codes bring together 29 central laws into four umbrella statutes, expanding obligations across establishments. While the structure is simpler, it also raises the risk wherein a single lapse could now carry wider consequences.

The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, adds another layer by making consent, breach reporting and accountability core obligations, with rules expected soon. Regulators such as RBI and SEBI are also asking for closer monitoring, more detailed reporting, and stronger KYC practices. On top of this, newer areas like ESG, data use and cybersecurity are gradually shaping the way compliance responsibilities are defined.

At the same time, the shift towards digital-first governance is changing expectations. Regulators are increasingly looking for reliable records, consistent filings, and audit trails that are easy to verify. In such a context, managing compliance through emails, spreadsheets, or scattered service providers may not be sustainable for long. The need for structured, technology-enabled models is becoming more apparent.

What all of these point to is a steady movement towards compliance systems that are better connected, more transparent and continuous. For businesses, the challenge is not only to keep up with changing laws, but also to adapt to the way compliance itself is being reshaped.

TAM: What risks do companies face if they miss compliance deadlines — penalties, even jail?

Rishi Agrawal: At TeamLease RegTech, our research and work in the field show that missed compliance deadlines in India expose businesses to very real risks:

Imprisonment / Jail Provisions: India has 1,536 Acts and 69,233 compliances, of which 843 laws carry criminal provisions. Many of these allow imprisonment even for procedural lapses such as late filings, missing registers, or incorrect returns. Over 26% of these clauses prescribe jail terms longer than one year, placing entrepreneurs and management under constant legal threat.

Fines, Penalties & Financial Liability: Financial penalties are steep and immediate. For example, delayed filings under the Companies Act can attract fines ranging from ₹100 per day to several lakhs, in addition to prosecution. For directors, liability is often personal, meaning penalties extend beyond the institution to individuals.

Reputational Risk: Public disclosures of non-compliance and regulatory action affect investor confidence and customer trust. Being listed as a defaulter under corporate filings or labour statutes can impact a company’s ability to raise funds, bid for contracts, or retain clients.

Operational Disruption: Missed deadlines can block renewals of licences or registrations (such as factory licences or labour welfare registrations), attract unplanned inspections, or in some cases, force operations to pause until compliance is regularised. Retrospective enforcement means companies must also reallocate resources to audits, legal defence, and corrective actions.

Legal & Leadership Liability: In India, over 2,500 clauses across laws explicitly assign personal liability to directors, officers, or key managerial personnel. This means missed deadlines can lead to litigation or criminal charges directly against leadership, with reputational and professional consequences.

Economic Burden on MSMEs: Our studies show that MSMEs spend ₹13–17 lakh annually on compliance (direct and indirect costs). A missed deadline adds significantly to this through legal counsel, remediation, penalties, and lost opportunities. For small firms, the financial and operational strain can discourage growth and formalisation.

These specifics illustrate why compliance in India is not just a regulatory requirement but a core business risk. Until structural simplification occurs, enterprises must treat timeliness, accuracy, and predictability as non-negotiable in compliance management.

TAM: Which industries are under the most compliance pressure today?Rishi Agrawal: When it comes to compliance pressure in India, it is less about which industry you are in and more about the complexity of your operations, the size of your workforce and geographical spread. A company with a single office and one plant may have hundreds of compliances to manage, but as soon as you add multiple plants across states, the obligations multiply exponentially.

Our research shows that a mid-sized enterprise can face over 1,000–1,500 unique compliance tasks annually, spread across labour, secretarial, taxation, EHS, commercial, and industry-specific categories. Each additional state adds another layer of licences, registers, and filings, not only increasing volume but also introducing duplication and overlaps. For larger enterprises with a nationwide presence, the number of obligations can run into several thousand per year.

India’s fluid regulatory environment compounds this complexity. With nearly 9,000 changes notified every year across more than 3,700 government websites, compliance is not static; it is a constantly moving target. Missing a deadline can mean financial penalties, reputational loss and in some cases, even criminal liability for directors.

At TeamLease RegTech, we see the pain points most acutely in organisations that are growing fast across geographies and functions. Without technology to centralise tracking and provide timely insights, compliance quickly becomes a drag on productivity. The reality is that the more complex and widespread a business is, the sharper the compliance pinch and the greater the risk of trying to manage it without RegTech.

Table 1. Complexity across sectors with different establishments (manufacturing units and corporate offices)

Source: TeamLease RegTech

TAM: How is contractor compliance being addressed in India’s evolving regulatory framework?

Rishi Agrawal: As businesses in India increasingly depend on contractors for functions ranging from housekeeping and logistics to IT and manufacturing, contractor compliance has emerged as a major challenge. Under laws such as the Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition) Act, 1970, the EPF Act, 1952 and the ESI Act, 1948, principal employers remain liable for lapses. If a contractor fails to pay wages, deposit provident fund or ESI contributions, or provide mandated benefits, the responsibility falls back on the employer.

The complexity grows with scale. Large organisations may engage dozens of contractors across locations, each with obligations covering challans, returns, registers, licenses and registrations under multiple Acts. Tracking these obligations manually through registers, reports and audits often leads to delays and gaps, leaving businesses exposed to penalties and reputational risks.

This is where RegTech is beginning to play a decisive role. At TeamLease RegTech, we support employers in three distinct ways: a platform to track and automate validation of contractor compliances; a platform combined with service support to validate obligations; and a comprehensive service model where our experts manage contractor compliance end-to-end using the platform as the backbone. Each approach blends technology and oversight to bring accountability, transparency and accuracy into contractor management.

By embedding RegTech into contractor oversight, employers can not only reduce liability but also foster a fairer and more transparent ecosystem for their extended workforce.

TAM: What is the vision behind a “National Open Compliance Grid”?

Rishi Agrawal: The vision for India is clear: a cashless, paperless, and presence-less compliance regime that reduces friction for businesses and strengthens trust with regulators. This is not just about digitising existing processes but about building a connected digital backbone that automates filings, enables real-time monitoring, and integrates multiple domains of compliance into a single journey.
A National Open Compliance Grid (NOCG) can serve as this keystone within India’s Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI). By enabling straight-through processing of filings, seamless communication of notices, and automated audit trails, NOCG can reduce delays, cut duplication, and deliver real-time regulatory updates. It would allow employers, regulators, and service providers to navigate requirements across labour, tax, finance, EHS, commercial, secretarial, and industry-specific laws at central, state, and local levels — all on a single digital rail.

Open APIs, embedded within the NOCG, will facilitate seamless exchange of information between entrepreneurs and government at Central, State, and Local levels through an ecosystem of Regulatory Tech providers. These APIs would support everything from periodic returns to the issuing of licences, registrations, permissions, NOCs, and Consent Orders — enabling authorities to push such records directly into EntityLocker as verifiable, tamper-proof documents.

PAN 2.0 (as a Common Business Identifier) and EntityLocker (as a verifiable, tamper-proof document repository) are the first building blocks of this vision. While adoption and implementation are still evolving, their integration into a larger system like the NOCG would unlock their full potential. Together, these initiatives can enable a transparent, verifiable, and automated compliance framework — turning India’s long reliance on paper and presence into a digital-native model of governance.

Also read: Role of Self-Regulatory Organisations in India’s Fintech and Digital Lending Sectors: Rishi Agrawal, Teamlease Regtech

TAM: Will India truly achieve paperless, cashless, presence-less compliance in the next 5 years?

Rishi Agrawal: Minimal to no use of physical forms, signatures, authorisations, consents and manual recordkeeping is a tedious job in an economy like India, which has been paper-dependent for decades. Digital payments of fees, fines, charges, challans also remain ad-hoc. However, regulations are increasingly being updated to allow online filing, digital signatures etc. The introduction of PAN 2.0 and EntityLocker promises a digitalised business environment, making ease of doing business a reality. Growing adoption of automation, AI and APIs is helping to leverage a true sense of a paperless and presenceless economy.

We see a future where compliance isn’t a hurdle, but a seamless layer built into every business process-powered by RegTech. Imagine MSMEs onboarding, filing, reporting, and proving compliance without ever touching paper; where digital signatures and APIs handle authorisations and consents; where audit trails are created automatically and available on demand. This is not just about moving manual steps online, but about embedding regulation into digital workflows so that compliance becomes proactive and near real-time. PAN 2.0, EntityLocker, and a potential National Open Compliance Grid provide the scaffolding for this transformation. Alongside, rationalising redundant laws and decriminalising trivial breaches will reduce friction, while stronger regulatory capacity- supported through public-private partnerships – ensures oversight keeps pace with innovation.

In spirit, businesses, regulators, and digital service providers are aligning around this RegTech-led transformation: moving from “how do we digitise old processes?” to “how do we redesign them digitally from the ground up?”. The future is about moving from signatures and stamps to digital trust — interoperable systems that automatically validate compliance. With a robust Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) that ties together PAN 2.0, EntityLocker, open APIs, and possibly a National Open Compliance Grid, India can move from basic digitisation to a truly digital-native compliance regime; paperless, cashless, and presence-less within the next five years.