स्तम्भ Stambh · Lokanīti

Eight Cities, Eight Rulebooks

A national market was promised in 2017. A firm that works in eight states still obeys eight versions of the law. The compliance load is the quiet tax on every Indian network.

Nikhil Sharma · लोकनीति Lokanīti · 8 July 2026 · 3 min read

I run Fabulous.Media, an agency network across eight Indian cities, and pay the cost this column describes.

The goods and services tax gave India one market in 2017. Nobody gave it one rulebook.

I run a network of agency partners in eight Indian cities. The work is the same in each. The law is not. Shops and establishments acts differ by state. Professional tax differs by state. The registers an employer must keep, the holidays she must grant, the hours a woman may work after dark, the forms, the renewal dates, the inspector who may arrive. Each state wrote its own and each one is enforced by a different office with a different mood.

TeamLease RegTech counted the whole universe in 2024. India has 1,536 acts and rules that apply to business, 69,233 compliance obligations under them and 6,618 annual filings. Of the obligations, 26,134 carry imprisonment as a penalty. Labour alone is 463 of the acts, 32,542 of the compliances and 17,819 of the clauses that can send an employer to jail.

Nobody faces all 69,233. But the share a firm faces grows with every state it enters, because most of the labour and establishment law is state law. A one-office agency in Jaipur carries Rajasthan’s version. The moment it joins a network and serves a client in Pune it is carrying Maharashtra’s too, and it did not hire a lawyer when it did.

One market, eight rulebooks. The compliance load is the tax every network pays and no network charges for.

What a rule costs the person obeying it

The head this column is argued under asks one question of every rule. What does it cost the person obeying it. Here the answer has a shape I can describe from inside.

It costs the partner a person. Somewhere in a twelve-person agency one head is spent on filings and renewals and the inspector, and that head is not spent on the client. It costs the centre a second person who checks that the eight partners have done it, because a network is only as compliant as its least compliant member and the client’s brand is on all eight. And it costs the whole arrangement speed. The brief that could start Thursday starts the Thursday after, because a registration in a new state has to clear first.

None of this is a complaint about the rules themselves. Most of them protect somebody. The complaint is that there are eight of each. A firm that obeys Rajasthan’s rule on working hours and Maharashtra’s rule on working hours is not twice as safe an employer. It is the same employer doing the same paperwork twice.

The four labour codes, passed in 2019 and 2020, collapsed twenty-nine central laws into four and finally came into force on 21 November 2025. Labour is a concurrent subject, so each state still writes its own rules under them, and a year on some states have notified rules and some have not. The frame is common. The rulebooks are still eight.

What I would ask for

Not fewer protections. One register. A firm registered as an employer in one state should be registered in all of them, with one set of returns filed once and shared by the states that want them. GST did exactly this for tax in 2017 and the sky did not fall. The states gave up a power and got a share of a larger pool. The same trade is available on establishments and labour, and nobody has offered it because the people paying the cost are small, scattered and busy, which is the definition of a constituency that does not get heard.

Until it happens the compliance load is a hidden price on every national brief, and the honest thing is to stop hiding it. In a network that publishes its scope it should sit on the tin as a line, so the client sees what the eighth state costs and the partner is paid for carrying it. A cost that is named can be argued down. A cost that is absorbed just makes the whole sector a little smaller every year.

Gurugram, 8 July 2026. The long essay this column belongs to argues that the case for India is a supply case and that the supply is waiting for a spine. The rulebook is one of the things the spine will have to carry.

Sources: TeamLease RegTech whitepaper on labour compliance, as reported by CXOToday, 6 May 2024, for 1,536 acts and rules, 69,233 compliances, 6,618 filings, 26,134 obligations carrying imprisonment, and the labour shares of each. The labour codes in force from 21 November 2025 and the state-rules position, iPleaders, verified May 2026.