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I tried starting a manufacturing unit in India (2020)

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Re: I tried starting a manufacturing unit in India (2020)

#301

Post by VBprogrammer »

skippyboxedhero wrote: post #237
otikik wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would go as far as to say that a little bit of corruption is healthy. It adds flexibility. For example: you don't want to register your neighbor's daughter for taxes just so that she can babysit your child once or twice. That is crazytalk. And yes, a lot of countries make sure that small payments don't require registration or taxes. This was just a quick example to make the point, sometimes the general law is just…

> I would go as far as to say... In the UK, it wasn't corruption. These people were paid money for products, they delivered those products, the price paid wasn't excessive. The UK has an independent auditor that found no evidence of corruption, and that (where product was delivered incorrectly) it was due to problems with contract specs. Afaik, there is only one case where a person was directly involved in politics a…

I think your argument boils down to don't assign to corruption what could more easily be assigned to incompetence.

Which I think is a fair point but does raise some questions about the competency of the civil servants and politicians we trust with a fairly large chunk of our income.

Re: I tried starting a manufacturing unit in India (2020)

#302

Post by draw_down »

soperj wrote: post #263
klausjensen wrote: post #109

~5 years ago, I hired three Indian developers. They asked me if we could set up an Indian legal entity, so that they could just get regular salaries in India with tax payments, deductions etc taken care of. I agreed and we got it done. One of the worst business-decisions of my life. The amount of red tape, stupid rules, corruption, signatures, stamps, showing up physically in a certain office etc etc... Mindblowing.…

> We have sent experts to the relevant tax offices etc, but the ONLY guy who can handle it is never there, refuses to deal with it, then says we need to go somewhere else - where we are sent back etc etc. Sent around in circles, basically - with everybody recognizing the money is in fact owed... That sounds exactly like they're needing a bribe, but you're too rooted in western ways of doing things that you don't real…

No post body was provided.

Re: I tried starting a manufacturing unit in India (2020)

#303

Post by gotorazor »

loudmax wrote: post #212
somat wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The paperwork is an attempt(usually misguided) to stop the corruption. The idea is that if you have to account and document all actions you will have act in the proscribed manner and not in a way that benefits you. This usually fails for the reason you posted. I am not really sure how you are supposed to stop corruption once it gets rooted in your society. It is a vile and subversive menace that turns every one into…

Perun has been making some of the best videos on Youtube since the start of the Ukraine invasion. Mostly on how military procurement works. It sounds like a dull topic, but when you start to understand the intricacies and the stakes involves it becomes fascinating. Absolutely recommend this channel.

@loudmax wasn't totally clear, but I understood what he was pointing to: Perun made a video about how corruption can destroy military procurement. And, possibly, why the Russians are doing so poorly in Ukraine. It was a terrific powerpoint slide video.

Re: I tried starting a manufacturing unit in India (2020)

#304

Post by twawaaay »

jefftk wrote: post #242
twawaaay wrote: post #192

You are doing it wrong. What they really wanted from you was a bribe, not a stack of papers. Nobody will ever openly admit they want a bribe. They will just drown you in bureaucracy until you get the idea.

My read is that the OP understands this but is ideologically opposed to paying bribes. Ex: "Obviously, they are playing 'hard to get' to get me to pay some bribe and initiate the process" and "So the Gram Panchayat NOC is stuck because of non payment of bribe".

You have a choice. Try to do business in India and pay bribes or move your business elsewhere.

There are countries of which India is one of them where you can't do any serious business without paying bribes. Serious business is anything where a government official even suspects you may have money to pay the bribe. So maybe not a hairdresser, but if you have money to buy a piece of land you are expected to have money to pay bribes.

There is a lot of examples of large companies that came to the same conclusion. For example, Ikea tried to do business in Russia without paying bribes and gave up. They also decided they will not be supporting corruption but they failed, faced the choice to pay bribes or get out and decided to get out.

India is corrupt to the bone. Corruption is way of life. It is a reason for people to get government jobs which otherwise do not pay enough.

If government jobs do not pay enough and people self select themselves to get these jobs anyway only because they plan on getting bribes to supplement their salary, how prevalent corruption would be?

This actually is the reason why fighting corruption is so hard. Because people self select themselves and displace those who do not accept corruption from those jobs. Then these officials advance and take up high level jobs and pretty soon you have entire structure corrupt to the bone at every level.

Re: I tried starting a manufacturing unit in India (2020)

#305

Post by winter_blue »

selimthegrim wrote: post #246
cubancigar11 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a popular misconception. Paperwork is basically created as part of job being done by the government employee. This employee is hired due to connections and the paperwork created to justify the job. The pointlessness makes people exert the tiniest amount of power they have, like reddit mods. The monetary corruption is more related to salary which is related to well being of economy. For example, during British…

Raj era ICS was much smaller, Congress and Nehru created a lot of the bureaucracy

Do you have any stuff I could read up on this?

Re: I tried starting a manufacturing unit in India (2020)

#306

Post by hinkley »

m12k wrote: post #117
klausjensen wrote: post #109

~5 years ago, I hired three Indian developers. They asked me if we could set up an Indian legal entity, so that they could just get regular salaries in India with tax payments, deductions etc taken care of. I agreed and we got it done. One of the worst business-decisions of my life. The amount of red tape, stupid rules, corruption, signatures, stamps, showing up physically in a certain office etc etc... Mindblowing.…

In the meantime companies like remote.com and similar have sprung up, providing "employer of record" services. Basically they let you outsource the act of having a company in a given country and employing people through it, much like how Stripe lets you outsource the whole merchant account thing for payments. It seems that whenever there's red tape, there's a business opportunity in paving over it and providing a san…

My intuition is that bribes would tend to scale with the square root of the size of the enterprise, so working with a large company would reduce your overhead versus talking to the government yourself.

Re: I tried starting a manufacturing unit in India (2020)

#307

Post by blobbers »

klausjensen wrote: post #109

~5 years ago, I hired three Indian developers. They asked me if we could set up an Indian legal entity, so that they could just get regular salaries in India with tax payments, deductions etc taken care of. I agreed and we got it done. One of the worst business-decisions of my life. The amount of red tape, stupid rules, corruption, signatures, stamps, showing up physically in a certain office etc etc... Mindblowing.…

This is precisely why upwork exists.

Re: I tried starting a manufacturing unit in India (2020)

#309

Post by LurkerAtTheGate »

pantalaimon wrote: post #126
mschuster91 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least for Germany... we're not overtly corrupt: you don't need to bribe policemen to get out of fake charges or traffic stops, you don't need to bribe city officials for building permits. But at the large scale, we are absolutely a corrupt nation: our former Chancellor Schröder sold us out to Russia, there have been dozens of millions euros worth of (shockingly ruled legal) corruption during the pandemic, the larg…

Another classic is regulatory capture. Oh that new building code or electrical code just so happens to only be fulfilled by using the latest (patented) product by company X? Well it's the state of the art, we can't build below that standard anymore.

Or union labor. I needed some electrical work on a new house, but there's no electricians available for months. Hanging out with a contractor friend, I mentioned that the state law says "the homeowner OR a licensed electrician", and he reacted like doing it myself meant wiring the house with dead orphans or something. I've done electrical work, I just make more money in software so I'm not licensed, but that is somehow even worse because I'm depriving the union electricians of work. So now its a secret I take to my grave apparently.
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