Hyderabad: The ministry of company affairs (MCA) has initiated moves to digitise the vast data on companies, simplify procedures and help businesses by streamlining processes through electronic filing systems. The MCA secretary, Komal Anand, has said that the ministry has embarked on a process to digitise six-crore public documents and soon "we will have 55 front offices apart from 20 offices of the registrar of companies all over the country."

Speaking at an interactive session on ''Simplified Exit Scheme (SES) - 2005'' organised by the Federation of Andhra Pradesh Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FAPCCI) here, Anand said the front offices are to be manned by Tata Consultancy Services for a contractual period of six years.

This is part of ''Project MCA - 21'' a programme to simplify procedures and do away with papers and usher in e-filing systems. About 6.07 lakh companies were registered as of March 2005, but the government needed to know how many were actually functioning and how many were not by taking stock.

About 40 per cent of companies were either not filing their balance-sheets and annual returns or delaying the process," she regretted. The registrar of companies, Andhra Pradesh, P N S Ponnunambi, later said of the 46,285 companies in the State, only 16,000 had filed their balance sheets and annual returns.

About 20,000 of them had not filed their papers and 4,000 had applied for listing under the SES in 2003, 2004 and 2005.