MAITRI-Setu: Intelligent Guidance Layer for Faster Industrial Approvals in Maharashtra

MAITRI-Setu is an add-on intelligence layer for Maharashtra's MAITRI single-window system (established under the Maharashtra Industry, Trade and Investment Facilitation Act, 2023). MAITRI already gives applicants one place to apply. What it does not yet fully provide is personalized guidance, pre-submission error detection, parallel routing of independent approvals, coordinated inspections, delay analytics and automatic incentive discovery. MAITRI-Setu fills exactly this gap without replacing MAITRI, duplicating its legal framework, or weakening any statutory safeguard. THE PROBLEM Setting up an industrial unit needs many approvals (factory licence, pollution NOC, fire NOC, labour registrations, electricity connection and others), depending on sector, location and size. Entrepreneurs struggle to know which approvals apply, documentation requirements differ across departments, progress is hard to track, and incentives must be discovered separately. Departments receive incomplete applications, repeat the same document scrutiny, coordinate manually, and have no visibility into where delays occur. THE APPROACH MAITRI stays the system of record, where the legal approval happens. MAITRI-Setu is the system of intelligence around it, storing only the extra layer: checklist logic, validation results, SLA calculations and incentive matches. KEY FEATURES 1. Personalized approval checklist: from a short project profile (sector, location, size, stage), a rules engine generates the exact list of applicable approvals. 2. Document pre-validation: uploaded documents are checked instantly using OCR, and errors or missing items are flagged before submission. 3. Parallel workflow orchestration: approvals that do not depend on each other are processed at the same time instead of one after another. 4. SLA tracking and alerts: every approval's deadline is monitored, with automatic alerts when a department is close to missing its timeline. 5. Incentive matching: government schemes the project qualifies for are surfaced automatically. 6. Joint inspection coordination: when several departments need to visit the site, visits are combined into one. 7. Single applicant dashboard: status, deadlines and pending renewals for all approvals in one place. 8. Officer view and analytics: officers see a queue of pre-checked applications, along with department-wise and district-wise analytics that show where delays occur, supporting policy improvements. TECHNICAL DESIGN A React.js and Tailwind CSS frontend, a Node.js/Express backend split into small single-purpose services (Auth, Rules Engine, Pre-Validation, Workflow Orchestrator, SLA Tracker, Incentive Matching, Analytics), a PostgreSQL database, Tesseract.js for OCR and json-rules-engine for rule-based decisions. The whole stack is free and open source. INTEGRATION AND FEASIBILITY In production, MAITRI-Setu calls MAITRI's departmental APIs to submit applications and check status, and is hosted on MeghRaj (Government cloud). The prototype uses realistic mocked department data to demonstrate this behaviour, since real API access needs an official partnership. If no open API is available, MAITRI-Setu works as a companion portal that guides and pre-validates the application and then hands the final version over to MAITRI. EXPECTED IMPACT Faster approvals through parallel processing and real SLA tracking; fewer incomplete or rejected applications; lower compliance cost through data reuse and joint inspections; better uptake of incentives; greater transparency for both applicants and departments; and a stronger Ease of Doing Business outcome, measurable over time through analytics.