Federal coordination is often the biggest bottleneck in India's ease-of-doing-business reforms. Analyse this with reference to sector-specific single-window portals.

A single-window portal promises one application in place of many, but in a federal polity the Union can only build the window — the approvals behind it belong to the States. India Cine Hub (ICH), the Ministry of Information & Broadcasting's film-facilitation portal managed by NFDC, illustrates both the promise and the constitutional limit [1].

Why coordination binds the reform

• Under the Seventh Schedule, police (List II, Entry 2), public order (Entry 1) and cinemas (Entry 33) rest with States; the Union holds only Entry 60, List I — certification of films. The actual permission — road closure, forest entry, municipal clearance — is signed by a State officer.
• Hence the Centre could only "urge" States to adopt ICH at the I&B conference with State I&PR Secretaries on 5 August 2025 [1]. Persuasion, not direction, is the available instrument.

How this shows up in sector portals

• ICH integrates filming permissions, incentives and resource mapping across Central, State and local agencies on one platform [2] — but its usefulness depends wholly on each agency logging in and responding.
• Onboarding is agency-by-agency: opening railway premises to crews required a separate joint mechanism between I&B and the Ministry of Railways [3]. Every State forest department or police force is another such negotiation.

But is it the biggest bottleneck?

• ICH drew 100 applications expressing interest in its first year [4] — evidence that information asymmetry, not only clearances, deterred producers earlier.
• Investment decisions still turn on money: the foreign-film incentive was raised to 40% of spend with the cap lifted from ₹2.5 crore to ₹30 crore [5], against only 35 foreign projects permitted in 2023 [6]. Portals cannot substitute for capacity or timely disbursal.

Federal friction is therefore a binding, not the sole, constraint. Embedding deemed approval after a notified deadline, empowered State nodal officers, and published disbursal timelines would convert cooperative federalism from an appeal into a workflow — making single-window reform genuinely single.