Go through the permissions a manufacturer holds and they all belong to the business. The trade licence is the firm’s. The pollution consent is the firm’s. The fire clearance is issued for the premises. A person signs for each of them, but what is being permitted is an activity carried on by an entity. Factory approval does not work that way. The Factories Act, 1948 operates through an individual it calls the occupier — a named human being who holds a statutory position in their own name. And where a company is involved, the proviso to that definition does not leave the choice open: it must be one of the directors. The Supreme Court closed the remaining argument in J.K. Industries Ltd. v. Chief Inspector of Factories and Boilers (1996), holding that the nomination cannot be handed to an employee or a manager, however senior and however much closer to the plant they sit. That is not a technicality about signatures. The name on the record is the name on a notice, and the person named is who proceedings reach. Which makes it a decision of real weight — and in practice it is made by whoever is holding the form, under time pressure, frequently without the person being named sitting in the room. Then the part that is told to nobody. Leaving the job does not take a name off a statutory record. A director resigns, everybody inside the business knows who runs things now, and the record still carries the name that was entered years ago. Only a filing changes it — and statutory nominations sit on nobody’s departure checklist, beside the bank mandate that always gets amended. One more order of business, and it is the most expensive error available here. Approval of the plans belongs before construction, not after it. Building feels like the start of a project because you can see it; the drawing does not. A shed put up first turns a paperwork problem into a physical one. Where we stop: we state no fee, no period and no State’s rules. We prepare no drawing. And we will not choose your occupier.
What this guide covers
Where the statute now sits. The Central Government brought all four labour codes into force with effect from 21 November 2025, rationalising twenty-nine central labour laws. The Factories Act, 1948 and the Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition) Act, 1970 named on this page are among them, subsumed into the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020. This code is therefore the text a fresh filing is made under, read together with the rules the Centre and your State notify beneath it, while the Act named here remains the source of the settled position this page describes and of every order passed before that date. We check which text applies to your establishment before we file, and we say so in writing.
Line up the permissions a manufacturing business holds and a pattern runs through all of them. Each is issued to an entity, for an activity, at a place.
The municipal licence permits a trade to be carried on. The pollution consent permits an operation to discharge within limits. The fire clearance relates to a building. The shop registration records an establishment. In every case a human being signs the application, but the thing being permitted belongs to the business, and if the person who signed leaves tomorrow the permission is unaffected.
The whole page in one line. One permission in that stack does not behave this way, and it is the one most manufacturers treat as just another item on the list.
The Factories Act, 1948 is built around an individual. Not a department, not a designation, not the company — a person, identified by name, who holds the statutory position the Act creates.
That is unusual enough in business regulation to be worth stopping on. Most legislation of this kind attaches duties to an undertaking and then provides, separately, for who may be proceeded against when the undertaking defaults. Here the duty is framed around the individual from the start.
Which is why a question that sounds administrative — whose name goes in this field — is in substance a question about which human being accepts a position.
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It is worth testing the claim against your own situation rather than taking it from us. Think of the last permission your business obtained and ask who, if something went wrong under it, would be written to. For almost everything a company holds, the answer is the company at its registered address, and the individual involved is whoever opens the post. Ask the same question about this one and the answer is a person, by name, wherever that person is.
The Act calls that person the occupier, and the term carries a defined meaning rather than its ordinary one.
It is not a job title that exists inside any company. Nobody is appointed Occupier in the way somebody is appointed a plant head or a safety officer. It is a statutory position that attaches to whoever is named for it, and in a working factory the people on the floor will often not know who holds it.
That last point is worth noticing. In most organisations, if you ask who is responsible for the factory, you will get a confident answer naming the person who runs it. That answer and the answer on the record are frequently different people.
Part of the trouble is the word itself, which in ordinary use means something quite different.
An occupier, in ordinary speech and in a good deal of other law, is whoever is physically in possession of premises — a tenant, a resident, the person in occupation. It is a word about buildings. Used here it is a word about responsibility, and the two senses have almost nothing in common.
So a manufacturer reading the term for the first time naturally supposes it means whoever occupies the premises, which would make it a question about the building. It is not. It is a question about which person carries the statutory position for what is done there.
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Now the provision that decides most of what follows. Where the factory is run by a company, the Act does not leave the choice of occupier at large. The proviso to the definition requires that the person nominated be one of the company’s directors.
Not somebody authorised by a director. Not somebody appointed by the board for the purpose. A director.
This is the single most consequential thing on the page for a company-run factory, and it is also the thing most often discovered late — typically when somebody looks at a filed form years afterwards and realises whose name is on it.
Two substitutions are attempted regularly and neither works.
The first is to name the person who actually runs the plant — the works manager, the production head, the general manager of the site. It is an entirely sensible instinct: that is who knows the factory, who is there daily, who would notice a problem first. The Act does not permit it where a company is involved.
The second is to try to put the company itself in the field, on the reasoning that the company owns the factory and the company should answer for it. That is not how the definition is framed.
Whether a company could nominate an employee rather than a director was argued, and it was decided.
In J.K. Industries Ltd. v. Chief Inspector of Factories and Boilers (1996), the Supreme Court held that where the occupier of a factory is a company, only a director can be nominated, and that the company cannot nominate an employee or a manager however qualified or however close to the operation.
So the question is closed and it is worth knowing it is closed. A manufacturer being told by anybody that a senior manager can hold this position is being told something that was argued to the Supreme Court and lost.
The reasoning is worth understanding, because it explains why the rule is strict rather than merely formal.
If an employee could be nominated, the position would travel in a predictable direction. It would be given to whoever was most junior among those plausibly connected to the plant, because that person is least able to decline it. The result would be a statutory responsibility for how a factory is run sitting with somebody who controls neither the budget nor the decisions.
Requiring a director keeps the position with the people who decide what the factory spends, including what it spends on safety. Whether or not one finds the rule convenient, that is a coherent thing for the law to insist on.
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In practice the nomination is made on an application form, among many fields, and it looks exactly like the fields around it.
Nothing on the page announces that this particular field is different in kind from the address of the premises or the description of the process. A name is written in, the form is submitted, and a statutory position has been created around a human being.
The whole difficulty of this subject is contained in that paragraph. A decision of real weight is taken through an interface that gives no indication of its weight, in the middle of a stack of ordinary particulars.
Which leads to the question we would put to any manufacturer who has an existing factory: who filled in that field, and when?
In our experience the answer is almost never the person named. It is a consultant, a company secretary, a plant administrator, or whoever was coordinating the application — somebody competent, acting properly, and completing a form they had been asked to complete.
They did nothing wrong. But a decision about who accepts a personal statutory position has been made by somebody whose role was to assemble an application, and that is the structural problem the next group is about.
Set the two facts side by side and the mismatch is obvious once seen.
On one side: a nomination that puts a named individual into a statutory position, with the exposure that carries, lasting for as long as the record stands. On the other: the level of the organisation at which that nomination is actually settled, which is usually a desk with a form on it and a deadline attached.
The weight of the decision and the level at which it is taken are badly mismatched, and nothing in the process draws attention to the gap.
It is worth tracing how the name gets chosen, because no single person in the chain is making a considered decision.
At no point has anybody weighed the question. It was resolved by availability, which is how most form fields are properly resolved — and this one is not most form fields.
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We want to be fair to that person, because they are frequently blamed afterwards and they should not be.
They were asked to obtain a licence. They obtained it. The field required a director and they entered one. Nothing in the task as given to them included deciding which director should accept a statutory position, and nobody told them the field was different from the others.
If the nomination was made badly, it was made badly by an organisation that delegated a board-level choice to an administrative task without noticing it had done so.
Add the circumstances, which are the ordinary circumstances of any new plant.
A factory file is assembled while a project is running. Money has been committed, equipment is on order, a start date exists and people are being recruited against it. Every item on the approvals list is an obstacle between the business and a date.
Nobody in that situation pauses over one field to convene a discussion about statutory exposure. The pressure is entirely towards completion, and the field is completed.
And the detail that makes it worst, which we have seen often enough to treat as typical: the person being named is frequently not in the room.
They are in another city, or in another part of the business, or simply busy. Their name is entered because they are the appropriate director, which they are. They may sign the form later among several; they may not see it at all if somebody else holds authority to sign.
So the test for any existing factory is a short one. Ask the person named whether they recall agreeing to be named. If the answer is that they do not, the nomination was not a decision — it was an entry.
Which brings us to what a properly made nomination actually involves. It is not elaborate and it does not need lawyers in a room.
The people who make decisions of that weight in your organisation consider who should hold it. The person proposed is told what the position carries — not in general terms but specifically, including that notices and proceedings name the individual. They agree, knowing that. And the agreement is recorded somewhere the company keeps its own records.
That is all of it — a conversation and a minute spent writing it down, and it converts an entry into a decision.
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It is worth being explicit about why a signature on the application is not the same thing, because businesses reasonably assume it is.
A director signing an application is confirming that the application is made on the company’s behalf. They are frequently signing several documents in one sitting, on a project they are not running day to day. A signature in that context does not establish that the person understood they were accepting a named statutory position, and in our experience it very often did not.
| Signing the application | A recorded nomination | |
|---|---|---|
| What it shows | The application was authorised | A named person accepted the position |
| Who decided | Often whoever assembled the file | The level that makes such decisions |
| Did the person know | Not established | Yes, in terms |
| Where it lives | With the authority | In the company’s own records too |
The recording matters for a reason that has nothing to do with the authority, which already has its copy of the form.
It matters internally. It is what lets the business answer, years later, the question of who holds the position and on what basis. It is what the named person can point to. And it is what makes the nomination visible as a live thing that belongs to somebody, rather than a historical act nobody remembers.
An entry on a form filed with an authority is invisible inside a company. A line in the company’s own records is not.
With the governance papers rather than with the factory file, and that placement is the practical recommendation of this group.
Factory files live with whoever handles the plant. Governance records live with whoever handles the company, and they are the records consulted when a director joins or leaves. A nomination kept with the plant papers is invisible at exactly the moment it matters; kept with the governance records, it sits where somebody will meet it.
One line in the right register. Name, date, the fact that the position was explained and accepted, and where the filed form sits. That single line is the difference between a business that knows who its occupier is and one that finds out from an inspector.
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We have said the position is substantial. This group sets out what that actually means, in plain terms and without dramatising it.
We are deliberately not going to list penalties or describe what any provision prescribes. Those are matters of law that depend on what has happened, and a page that enumerated them would be doing something other than explaining a document. What we will do is set out the shape of the exposure, since the shape is what somebody actually weighs before agreeing to hold the position.
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The first thing to clear away is the common assumption, which is that this is a nominal designation of the kind companies maintain for various filings — a name required by a form, held by whoever is convenient, with nothing attached.
A good deal of corporate paperwork does work that way, which is why the assumption is reasonable. This does not. The Act is constructed around the occupier, and the responsibilities it creates are that person’s responsibilities.
The practical form it takes is simple: when something is issued, it is issued to the named individual.
Not to the company, with the individual mentioned somewhere. To the person. Their name is on it, and they are the one required to respond to it.
For somebody who did not know they had been named, the arrival of such a thing is a genuinely unpleasant surprise, and it is the commonest way people learn they hold the position at all.
Where matters go further, they go further against the individual. That is the architecture of the Act rather than an unusual outcome.
We will go no further into it than that. What happens in any particular case depends on facts, on what provision is invoked and on the view a court takes, and that is advocate territory rather than ours. The point for this page is narrower: the exposure is personal, and a person deciding whether to accept the nomination should know that is what they are deciding.
One consequence worth drawing out, because it affects who should hold the position rather than merely how seriously to take it. A statutory responsibility that reaches an individual is only fair, and only effective, if that individual can actually influence the thing they answer for. A director who can require a safety measure to be funded is in a position to discharge it. A director named for convenience, with no standing over the plant, carries the exposure without the means.
That is not a legal argument and we do not offer it as one. It is a practical reason for a board to name the director who is genuinely connected to the operation rather than the one who happened to be available on the day the form was completed.
And the specific misunderstanding that needs correcting, because it is the one that makes people relaxed about the nomination.
Businesses are used to the idea that the entity stands between its officers and most obligations, and that an officer is reached only in particular circumstances. That instinct is sound across a great deal of commercial law.
It travels badly here. Courts have treated this Act as a complete scheme of its own, operating through the occupier directly, rather than one in which the company must be brought in before the named person can be reached. A director relying on the usual corporate instinct is relying on something that does not apply in the same way.
Put the group together and the conclusion about process follows by itself.
If the exposure is personal, then the person bearing it is the only one who can properly accept it. Not their colleague, not the board on their behalf while they are elsewhere, and certainly not whoever is completing the form. That is not a point about formality; it is simply what it means for something to be personal.
Which is the test for any nomination, existing or proposed. Did the person carrying it say yes, knowing what they were saying yes to? If not, the organisation has placed an exposure on somebody without asking.
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This needs balancing, because leaving it one-sided would be its own sort of inaccuracy.
Holding the position does not mean a director is answerable for everything that happens on the premises regardless of circumstances, and it does not mean the role is unmanageable. Factories are run safely by ordinary companies every day, with a director named, and nothing comes of it because nothing goes wrong.
The position is a reason to take the factory’s safety arrangements seriously and to ensure the person named has the standing to insist on them. It is not a reason for alarm, and we would not want a reader to take alarm from this page.
And here is the limit of what this page can properly do, stated before anybody relies on it too far.
We have described the shape of a statutory position so that a business can make a decision about who holds it with their eyes open. We have not advised anybody on their liability, because that is not documentation work and we are not the people to do it.
Where that advice properly belongs. A director who wants to understand their own exposure in their own circumstances should ask somebody qualified to advise on it, and should ask before accepting the nomination rather than after a notice arrives. It is a short conversation and it is considerably cheaper at that end.
We turn from the person to the sequence, and to the one error on a factory file that cannot be corrected by filing something later.
Most approval mistakes are recoverable on paper. A missing document is supplied. A wrong figure is revised. An application made to the wrong office is made again to the right one. The cost is delay and some expense, and the thing itself is unaffected.
One mistake here is not of that kind, because by the time it is discovered, the thing that is wrong has been built.
The structure of factory approval places the examination of the site plan and the building drawings before the building exists. The authority is asked to look at what is proposed and to approve it, and that approval is the thing that permits construction to proceed.
It is not a certification obtained afterwards to confirm that what was built is acceptable. It is a prior step, and the sequence is deliberate: a drawing can be changed at the cost of redrawing, and a building cannot.
There is a second reason the step sits where it does, beyond the obvious one about concrete. The examination of a plan is the only point in the whole process at which an authority looks at the factory as a whole — the layout, the movement of people and material, the relationship between what is stored and what is done. Once the plant is running, inspections look at conditions. The layout question is asked once, and it is asked of a drawing.
What happens instead, with some regularity, is that the sequence is inverted.
A business leases or buys a site, puts up what it needs, installs the plant, and then begins the approvals process in earnest — treating the drawings as something to be submitted in the course of getting licensed rather than as the gate that should have come first.
By the time anybody looks at the plans properly, they are not plans. They are a description of a building that is already standing, and any observation about them is an observation about something physical.
None of this is carelessness, and we want to be unambiguous about that, because it happens to competent people who are simply busy.
Three ordinary pressures push in the same direction. A lease is running and rent is being paid on an empty site. Equipment has lead times and arrives whether or not a building is ready. And an approvals process whose timing nobody can predict is a poor thing to hold a construction schedule behind.
Every one of those is a real commercial pressure, and together they produce an entirely understandable decision to start building and sort the paperwork alongside. The decision is understandable and it is still the expensive one.
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Underneath those pressures sits something less practical and more human, which is worth naming because recognising it is most of the defence.
Building looks like progress. There is a site, there are people on it, something rises week by week, and everybody involved can see the project advancing. It feels like the beginning of the factory because it is the first thing that is visible.
Whereas the drawing produces nothing to look at. A professional prepares it, it goes somewhere, and for a period nothing observable happens. Measured by the only yardstick available on site — is anything happening — it registers as a delay rather than as the project beginning.
The first real act of building a factory produces nothing anybody can see, which is why it is so reliably treated as something to be caught up with later.
A business that internalises one thing from this group should internalise that. The project starts when the drawing is submitted, not when the ground is broken.
What happens if the order was inverted? We will not pretend to a general answer, because there is not one.
It depends on what was built, what the applicable rules require, how far the departure goes and what view the authority takes. Some situations are regularised with an amended drawing and an explanation. Others are not. We have seen both and we cannot tell you from a page which you are in.
What we can tell you is the range, and the top of the range is the point of this group.
Where what was built does not meet what the rules require — a clearance, a distance, an arrangement, an access — the correction is not a document. Something has to be altered, in a building that is finished and very often already running, with plant installed in it.
And that is a different order of cost entirely. Not a delay and a fee, but construction work on a working factory, plus whatever the stoppage costs while it happens.
So if a business that has not yet broken ground reads one section here, we would want it to be this one.
The occupier question is the more interesting one and the more neglected one, and it lasts longer. But it can be fixed at any time by a decision and a filing. This one cannot be fixed by a decision at all once the concrete has set.
So the single instruction for a business at the planning stage. Find out what the plan-approval step requires before you commit to a construction date, and hold the date behind it rather than the other way round. It is the only step on a factory file where being early is worth real money.
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A shorter group, about a confusion that costs less than the last one but catches more businesses.
What a factory needs is commonly spoken of as one thing — the factory licence — and treated as a single item that is either obtained or not. In practice there are three distinct things, with different timings and different failure modes.
The first establishes the factory: the premises are registered, the particulars are recorded, and the entry comes into existence. It is a one-time act in the ordinary course and it is not the thing that lapses.
Businesses sometimes believe that because they registered, they are permanently covered. Registration is the foundation and not the permission.
The distinction matters most in one specific situation, which is a change of hands. When a factory is bought, leased or taken over, businesses frequently assume that because the premises are registered, the incoming operator is covered by what is already on the record. The registration describes the premises; it does not transfer an operator’s permission or an occupier’s nomination, and both of those are about people rather than the building.
The second permits operation, and unlike the first it does not sit still. It runs for a period and has to be kept alive.
We are not going to state the period, for the reason given throughout: this legislation is administered through State rules and periods differ. What does not differ is the structure — something recurs, and a recurring obligation needs an owner.
The practical consequence of treating three things as one is that attention is paid to the beginning and not afterwards.
Enormous care goes into the original application, because it is a project with a deadline and somebody is accountable for it. Once the factory is running, the file goes into a cupboard, and the item that recurs recurs quietly.
Worth stating plainly for anybody setting up. The work of getting licensed ends. The work of staying licensed does not, and nobody is usually appointed to the second.
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A renewal is not merely a payment. It is an occasion on which the particulars are confirmed, and that is where it intersects with everything else on this page.
The particulars are the ones the original grant was made against: the premises, the worker numbers, the installed power, and the person named as occupier. A renewal submitted without anybody checking those against reality confirms a description that may no longer be true.
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Why does a recurring item lapse in an otherwise well-run factory? For the reason recurring items always lapse.
Monthly obligations build habits. Annual ones attach to an annual cycle and get carried along by it. An item that recurs on its own schedule, owned by no department, attaches to nothing — and in a working factory there is no natural moment at which anybody opens the certificate folder.
The fix is the dullest possible one and it works: the date belongs in whatever shared calendar the business actually uses, under a role rather than a person, with a reminder early enough that a discrepancy could be corrected before the filing.
And the situation this group exists to prevent, which we see more often than the plan-sequence error.
A factory holds a current licence. Every document is in order. And the licence describes premises of one size, a workforce of one number and power of one rating, while the factory on the ground has a second shed, a third shift and twice the machinery.
Nothing was concealed and nobody decided to operate outside the licence. The business grew, which is what businesses do, and the certificate stayed exactly as it was issued.
It is worth placing this permission among the others, because manufacturers ask where it sits and the answer affects sequencing.
| Permission | What it responds to | Where it is covered |
|---|---|---|
| Which permissions apply at all | The activity, described as a process | Our trade licence page |
| Fire clearance | The building and its arrangements | Our fire NOC page |
| Pollution consent | What the process emits or discharges | Our consent to establish and operate page |
| Contract labour licence | Workers on site who are not yours | Our contract labour page |
| Weights and measures | Instruments used in trade | Our weights and measures page |
Each of those is a subject of its own and each is argued properly on its own page. We are not going to summarise them here, because a summary of five subjects is worse than a pointer to five treatments of them.
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One sequencing point does belong here, though, because it is about this permission rather than about the others.
Several of those approvals want to see each other. A business that applies for them in parallel, hoping to save time, frequently finds that each is waiting on something from another, and the parallel approach collapses into a sequential one with everybody’s time already spent.
Which is the practical argument for establishing the order before beginning anything. Not because the order is complicated, but because discovering it halfway through costs more than asking at the start — and the order is the first thing we establish on any file of this kind.
The last group before the practical one deals with the limits of what a documentation service can honestly offer on a factory file, and we would rather set them out than let them be assumed.
The clearest is the drawing. A factory application turns on a site plan and building drawings, and those are not documents in the sense that the rest of the file is. They are technical work.
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They are prepared by somebody qualified to prepare them and they carry that person’s certification. That certification is not a formality attached to a drawing somebody else produced — it is the professional standing behind what the drawing says.
So no arrangement exists in which a documentation service draws the plans and a professional merely signs them off. The professional’s work is the drawing.
We say it at this length because the question is asked, usually by businesses hoping to keep the file with one provider, and occasionally because somebody else has offered.
An offer to handle a factory file end to end including the plans, at documentation prices, is an offer worth examining closely. Either a qualified professional is involved and is being paid, or the drawings are coming from somewhere that will not stand behind them. On this particular document, the second is not a saving.
Our position, stated once. We coordinate with whoever prepares your plans and we build the file around them. We do not produce them, and we would decline if asked.
And one more role, which businesses engage less often and should engage earlier.
A factory file raises questions about the process itself — how the work is arranged, what the hazards are, what the arrangements for the people doing it need to be. Those are not questions a drawing answers and they are not questions a documentation service can answer. They need somebody who understands the manufacturing process well enough to speak to it.
A business setting up usually has that person somewhere, in its own operations team or in the group. The mistake is not failing to hire one; it is failing to involve them until after the file is assembled, when their observations are expensive rather than cheap.
There is a quiet benefit to involving them early that has nothing to do with approvals. The questions they ask about a proposed layout — where material enters, where people walk, what sits next to what — are the same questions that make a factory work well day to day. Businesses that bring that person in at the drawing stage usually report that the plant runs better, which is a return on the engagement regardless of what any authority says about it.
A licence of this kind is not granted in the abstract. It is granted for stated premises, for a stated maximum number of workers, and for stated installed power. Those figures sit on the certificate.
A factory that grows past them has not committed a dramatic act. It has hired, taken an extra shift, brought in a second line. But the licence it is operating under describes a smaller place than the one now running, and nobody inside the building is watching the figures — the certificate is in a folder in an office, and the hiring happens on the shop floor.
So the revision is somebody’s job or it is nobody’s. The licence does not stretch quietly to fit a larger operation, and the gap is discovered by an inspection rather than by the business.
The identical drift problem, in its contract-labour form, is set out properly in our contract labour licence work — a licence granted against a number while the site ignores the number. We will not repeat that argument here; it belongs there and is made better there.
Which brings us to the question nobody asks at the right moment, and which is the real reason this page insists on the occupier being a deliberate choice.
A director is named. Years pass. That director resigns, retires, moves to another group company, or simply stops having anything to do with the plant. Inside the business everybody knows who runs things now.
The record does not know. It still carries the name that was entered, and it will keep carrying it until somebody files to change it.
The uncomfortable part, stated once. Leaving the job does not, by itself, remove a person from a statutory record. The departure is an internal fact. The record is a public one, and only a filing changes it.
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Every organised business has a handover list for a departing director: signatures withdrawn, bank mandates amended, authorisations revoked, resignation filed. Statutory nominations of this kind are routinely not on it.
They are not forgotten through carelessness. They are forgotten because they were made once, years earlier, by somebody filling a form, and nobody since has had occasion to remember that the nomination exists at all. That is the cost of the decision having been made at form-filling level rather than at board level.
Two lines that solve it permanently. Put the current occupier’s name in the same register you keep for authorised signatories, and put the statutory nominations on the departure checklist beside the bank mandate. Neither takes a meeting.
More broadly, and this is the one administrative habit we would urge on any manufacturer: keep your own one-page record of what the factory holds.
Which approvals exist, what each is numbered, who is named on each, what figures each was granted against, and when each falls due. Not because the authorities will ask for it — they hold their own copies — but because nobody inside the business currently has that page, and its absence is why the drift and the stale nomination both survive for years.
It belongs with the other permissions rather than on its own. Our legal file management work exists for exactly this, though a manufacturer with a disciplined office manages it perfectly well in a spreadsheet.
One further reason it earns its place, and it is the reason businesses find most persuasive once they have been through it. When a factory is sold, refinanced or examined by anybody in a due diligence, this is precisely the page that will be asked for. A manufacturer who can produce it in an afternoon is in a different position from one whose answer is that the consultant who handled it has stopped answering calls.
Three situations, and they want quite different things.
The largest group are setting up and have discovered, usually from a consultant or a landlord, that what they are building needs approval before it is built. These are the easy files and also the ones where the advice is worth most, because nothing has gone wrong yet.
The second group are already operating and have grown — more workers, more power, a new shed — and somebody has realised the certificate describes a smaller place. That is a correction exercise and it is better begun voluntarily than after an inspection.
The third have a notice, or an inspection has happened. Those are not documentation files at all, and we say that in the first conversation instead of accepting the work.
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What we carry is the file and the order of it: establishing which approvals the activity attracts and in what order, identifying what the plan-approval stage will need before anything is built, assembling the application set, getting the occupier nomination made as a decision and recorded properly, and keeping the whole thing together so that the renewal and any revision later have a starting point.
What we do not do: prepare or certify any drawing, and that limit is absolute. Plans belong with a qualified professional, and we would rather say that than take on something we cannot stand behind.
Two professionals are usually needed alongside us on a factory file and a business is better off engaging both early: somebody qualified to prepare and certify the plans, and somebody who knows the manufacturing process well enough to speak to the safety and process questions. Neither is a documentation role, and neither is ours.
Before anything is filled in, four questions, and in this order, because each one can change the answer to the next.
What is actually being done on the premises, described as a process rather than as a trade name — that is what decides which thresholds are in play at all. What the premises are and what state they are in, because that settles whether the plan stage is ahead of you or behind you. What the numbers are going to be at peak rather than on the opening day. And only then who the occupier will be.
Why the numbers question comes before the nomination and not after. A business that answers it with its opening headcount applies for a licence describing a factory it will outgrow within a year. We would rather ask an awkward question about next year’s shifts now than file a correction later.
Place Order — no advance, pay after work
One thing on this file is not ours to decide, and we decline it every time it is offered.
We will not choose your occupier, and we will not suggest a name. People ask — usually the person filling the form, often under time pressure, sometimes hoping we will name somebody convenient. It is a decision about who in the organisation accepts a personal statutory position, and nobody outside the organisation should be making it.
Our part is to see that it gets made as a decision. That the people choosing understand what the nomination carries, that the person named has agreed in terms rather than been written in, and that the agreement sits in the company’s own records and not only on a form submitted to an authority.
Set out plainly, because on a subject with inspections and penalties attached, overconfidence is the expensive kind of error.
That a factory is compliant — a complete application is not a safe factory and we will never let the two be confused. That any approval is certain, or certain by a particular date. That a particular layout or machine arrangement satisfies anything, which is a question for qualified people. That a given headcount or power figure keeps you below a threshold. Or that any period we state covers the authority’s side as well as ours.
And where an inspection has produced a notice, or a prosecution has been launched, or an accident is being investigated, that is not a documentation file and it changes immediately. Court work is for your advocate, whose fee is engaged and paid by you directly; we do not quote, collect or share it. Where a worker’s injury is what is in question, our employee compensation work sets out that separate route.
Place Order — no advance, pay after work
Our charge, printed here as every charge on this site is.
₹11,999, with the usual span running 30 – 60 days.
Within it: establishing which approvals the activity attracts and the order they must be taken in, the application set assembled and checked, the occupier nomination handled as a recorded decision, coordination with the plan-approval stage, and the file kept together for the renewal. Outside it: every statutory fee, which is the authority’s and is paid to them; the preparation or certification of any drawing, which belongs to a qualified professional; any safety or process assessment; and anything arising from an inspection or a notice.
On the span: it is wide, and it is wide honestly. A file on a clean site with drawings ready moves at one speed and a file waiting on a plan stage moves at another, and the part of the clock that belongs to an authority has never been within anybody’s control. We would rather print a wide range than a flattering one.
One closing thing, and it costs a conversation rather than money.
Before the drawings, before the application, before anybody chooses a date to start building, settle who the occupier is going to be — properly, at the level in the organisation where that choice belongs, with the person named sitting in the room and saying yes.
It is the only part of a factory file that attaches to a human being rather than to a building, it is the part that outlasts everything else on the file, and it is the part most reliably decided by whoever happens to be holding the form.
Everything else here is about a place. One line is about a person, and that line will still be in force long after the drawings are filed and forgotten.
Where what is being made is a drug, the manufacturing side has its own licensing regime under the Drugs and Cosmetics Act entirely apart from this one, and the sale of what comes out of it needs its own licence in the right form. Drug licence assistance covers the sale side.
Two things decide how a factory file goes, and neither is the application form. The first is order: plan approval comes before construction, not after it, and a shed built first turns a paperwork problem into a physical one. The second is the occupier — a named individual who carries a personal statutory position, who for a company must be a director, and who stays named on the record until somebody files to change it. So we start there: which approvals the activity attracts and in what sequence, what the plan stage will want before anybody breaks ground, the application set assembled and checked, and the occupier nomination handled as a recorded decision with the person’s agreement in the company’s own papers. What we do not do: prepare or certify any drawing, choose your occupier or suggest a name, assess safety or process questions, or promise that any approval will be granted or granted by a date. Where an inspection or a notice has already happened, we say at once that this is no longer a documentation file.
Where the law in this page comes from, and what we have not put in it. The two legal anchors are the Factories Act, 1948 — the definition of a factory and the proviso to the definition of occupier, under which a company must nominate one of its directors — and the Supreme Court’s decision in J.K. Industries Ltd. v. Chief Inspector of Factories and Boilers (1996), which settled that the nomination cannot be passed to an employee or a manager. Beyond that, nothing: no fee, no threshold figure of our own, no period, no form number, no state’s rules. Factories legislation is administered through State rules that differ on procedure, documents and timelines, and a number lifted off a general page and dropped onto one State is exactly how a file goes wrong on day one.
The line to carry out of here if only one survives. Every other permission a business holds belongs to the business. This one puts a named human being on a statutory record, that person must be a director where a company is involved, and the name stays there until a filing removes it — not until the person leaves.
Where each part of this properly sits. Your State’s factories rules and the inspectorate that administers them, for the procedure, the documents and the fees. A qualified professional for the plans, and somebody who knows your process for the safety questions — neither is a documentation role. Our trade licence page for which permissions an activity attracts at all, which it covers properly including where the factory threshold bites; our fire NOC and pollution consent pages for the approvals that sit alongside this one; and our contract labour licence page where the people on the premises are somebody else’s workers. And an advocate from the moment an inspection, a notice or an accident is involved.
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