India regulates by permission, and the permission is rarely the end of the matter. Registration as an NBFC and the obligations that attach to the layer a lender falls into, authorisation as a payment aggregator or an issuer of prepaid instruments, registration of intermediaries with SEBI and of intermediaries and corporate agents with the IRDAI, manufacturing and import licences from the CDSCO and the state licensing authorities, FSSAI registration for food and nutraceuticals, legal metrology and packaged commodity declarations, BIS certification and the compulsory registration scheme, telecom authorisations and OSP registration, extended producer responsibility registration under the e-waste, plastic waste and battery waste rules, importer and exporter codes and restricted item authorisations from the DGFT, consents to establish and operate from the state pollution control boards, and the state level shops, establishments and factory registrations that a national rollout multiplies by the number of states it touches. Each licence carries conditions, reporting, inspection and a power of suspension, and each carries an approval requirement when control changes.

Be it determining whether a product needs a licence at all and recording why it does not, obtaining a registration and then holding it through the first inspection, seeking prior approval for a change in control or a change in the shareholding of a regulated entity, mapping a nationwide rollout against state level registrations, responding to a show cause notice or an inspection observation, or filing for compounding under FEMA or adjudication under the Companies Act after a lapse has been found, the work begins from the same question: what exactly is the regulated activity, and who is performing it. Answering that correctly usually determines whether the rest of the exercise is a filing or a restructuring.

We work from primary sources. Where a compliance baseline moves quarterly, notifications, circulars and FAQ updates are tracked as issued rather than through secondary commentary, and advice states the date and the instrument it rests on so that it can be re-tested when the instrument changes. Where the answer is that no licence is required, we say so and record the reasoning in a form that will hold when a bank, an acquirer or the regulator itself asks the question later. Our founder has spent two decades working with regulators and industry associations on how these rules come to be written, which shapes both what we anticipate and how we frame a representation.