Category: Building in India

Fika B’lore is a Scandinavian bakery in North Bangalore that Niklas and I co-founded and run as equal partners. It operates as a foreign-owned Indian private limited company. This page is the structured version of how we stood it up and what the machinery underneath it has taught us. The narrative version, with the actual texture of getting it wrong, is the essay What setting up a company in India actually is. This is the record.

The context

• A real operating business, not a holding shell: a bakery with a kitchen, staff, customers, and weekly delivery.
• Foreign owners, Indian company. We built it as a private limited company under India’s automatic route, which lets a foreign-owned company in most sectors exist without prior government approval.
• Based in Karnataka, within Bangalore. India’s second-largest state for inbound investment, which matters less to a bakery and more to anyone using this as a reference for their own entry.
• Food sector, which adds a licensing layer (FSSAI) that a services company would not carry. Worth separating, when reading this, what is general and what is ours.

What we built

The entity. A private limited company: name reservation, digital signature certificates, director identification numbers, the certificate of incorporation. The constraint that shapes everything for foreign founders is the requirement for at least one India-resident director. It reads as a footnote and decides whether two foreigners can actually hold and run their own company.

The registrations. GST, the FSSAI food license, Udyam for MSME status, professional tax under Karnataka, and shops and establishments registration. Each is its own portal and its own timeline. Several sit in a queue and move at the speed of someone else’s attention.

The premises. A commercial kitchen lease in Bettahalsoor. This was one of the easy parts for us: we found the space, signed, and that was largely that, against the horror stories I had braced for.

The foreign-capital path. Because foreign money funded the company, the shareholding is reported to the Reserve Bank under FEMA, through the FC-GPR filing, which carries a company secretary’s certificate and a valuation. For us this was lighter than warned, because the capital was already in the country before we needed it. For a founder bringing money in from outside at the moment of setup, it can be a real piece of work.

Money in. The bank account and the payment gateway were the genuine bottleneck. The account took months for reasons nobody could name. The gateway, Razorpay, now requires Aadhaar-based identity to onboard, as every gateway in India effectively does, and Aadhaar is not quick for a foreigner. Once live, UPI and the digital rails are excellent. Getting onto them is the hard part.

People. Hiring and employing staff locally, with everything that comes with being a real employer in India rather than a foreign company parking a few roles here.

What was harder than expected, and what was easier

• Harder: the FSSAI license (slow, queue-bound, needed persistent pushing), the bank account (months, unexplained), and getting a payment gateway live (Aadhaar-gated).
• Easier: the commercial lease, and the FEMA and FC-GPR reporting in our specific case, because the money was already here.
• The lesson in the split: you cannot predict which parts will be hard. The map of where the friction lives is not the one in the guides.

What went wrong, and what it taught us

The honest list, because this is where the useful part is.

• The FSSAI license stalled, not by rejection but by neglect. It kept settling to the bottom of the pile. The fix was not a better argument; it was presence, repeated follow-up, making it easier to process than to keep setting aside. The system does not refuse you, it deprioritises you.
• The bank account took months for reasons no one could explain. Not refused, just slow, with a different explanation every time.
• Payment-gateway onboarding is identity-gated. Aadhaar-based KYC is now standard for gateways, and a foreigner does not get Aadhaar quickly.
• The rules change constantly. GST rates move, FSSAI requirements get revised, and no one tells you. Keeping track is the ongoing tax of operating here, not a one-time setup cost. This is the single biggest thing.
• The resident-director requirement matters far more than it reads. It shaped how two foreigners could actually hold and run their own company.

What I would tell the next founder

Sequenced, because the order is the thing that is missing from every guide.

1. Decide the entity and the resident-director question first. It constrains everything after it.
2. Incorporate, then start the slow, queue-based registrations immediately, FSSAI above all. Push them actively; submitted and waiting is how they sink.
3. Start the bank account and payment gateway early. This is a long pole: unexplained bank delays and Aadhaar-gated gateway onboarding.
4. On FEMA, it depends on your situation. If you are bringing capital in at setup, get advice early. If the money is already in the country, it is likely lighter than the warnings suggest.
5. Assume the rules will change under you. Build the habit of checking GST and FSSAI rather than trusting a setup. This never stops.
6. Keep the reserved work with licensed people, and keep the judgment yourself. The audited accounts, certified filings, FEMA certificates, and legal opinions must come from a chartered accountant, a company secretary, an advocate. The decision about sequence, timing, and what is about to go wrong does not.

What generalises, and what does not

The mechanics, choosing and forming the entity, the FEMA reporting, GST, hiring, getting onto the banking and payment rails, and dealing with regulators as people who deprioritise rather than refuse, are the same for any foreign company building in India. The FSSAI layer and the bakery specifics are ours. The reason this record is worth keeping is the part that crosses sectors: the distance between a company that exists on paper and a company that actually works, which is made of dozens of small, undocumented steps, and which is the real work of entering India.

The FSSAI license sat in the queue for months. Not rejected, which I could have understood and done something about. Just not moving. Every time I checked, it had somehow settled back to the bottom of the pile, behind whatever had come in after it. There was no reason given because there was no decision being made. It was a food license for a bakery, an ordinary thing, and it was going nowhere. The only way I found to move it was to keep showing up: calling, following up, making it slightly more inconvenient to ignore than to process. I had spent twenty years in supply chain before this. I had run procurement across borders. And there I was in Bangalore, learning that the way you move a stuck application is not escalation, it is persuasion, repeated.

That gap is the thing nobody puts in the deck.

Incorporation is the part someone is licensed to sell you; everything that turns the certificate into a company that actually works comes after, and nobody packages that part.

When Niklas and I decided to build Fika B’lore, a Scandinavian bakery in North Bangalore, I thought setting up the company was the boring part. You incorporate. You get a few registrations. You open a bank account. Then the real work, the baking and the selling, begins. I had read the guides. A foreign-owned private limited company in India goes through the automatic route for most sectors, no government approval needed to own it. Name reservation, digital signatures, a director identification number, the certificate of incorporation. A few hundred dollars if you use a competent firm. On paper it is a solved problem, and the firms that sell it have made it look like one.

What the guides do not tell you is that the company exists on paper for weeks before it can actually receive a single rupee.

Incorporation is the cheap part. It is also, in a sense, the easy part, because it is the part somebody is licensed to do for you. After the certificate comes the long tail: the GST registration, the FSSAI food license because we make things people eat, Udyam for the MSME status, professional tax under Karnataka, the shops and establishments registration. None of these is hard in the sense of being intellectually difficult. They are hard in the sense that several of them sit in a queue and move at the speed of someone else’s attention, and the FSSAI license was the clearest case: submitted and waiting is exactly how a thing sinks. You do not push it through with a better argument. You push it through by being present, again and again, until it is easier to process than to keep setting aside.

The part I had braced for turned out to be one of the easy ones. The kitchen lease, a commercial space in Bettahalsoor on the northern edge of the city, I had expected to be a fight, because I had read enough horror stories to expect one. It did not come. We found the space, signed, and that was largely that. You cannot tell in advance which parts will be hard. The map of where the friction actually lives is not the one in the guides.

Money was where the friction actually lived for us, and not in the way I expected. The bank account took months, for reasons no one could ever quite name. It was not refused. It just took the time it took, and the time it took was long, and every explanation I got was a different explanation. Then the payment gateway. India’s live payment rails are genuinely ahead of what I was used to in Sweden, UPI is a better everyday experience than anything I left behind, and once you are on the rails the paying is the smooth part. Getting on them is not. Every gateway now wants Aadhaar-based identity to onboard you, and Aadhaar is not a thing a foreigner gets quickly. The hard part of money in India was never the paying. It was being allowed to start.

There is a structural fact the guides mention in passing that turns out to shape everything for foreign founders: a private limited company in India needs at least one director who is resident in India. Read past quickly, it is a footnote. Lived, it decides whether two foreigners can actually hold and run their own company, what control looks like, and how the bank sees you. We had to work it out properly rather than read past it.

The FEMA side, the reporting to the Reserve Bank when foreign money funds an Indian company, can be a real piece of work. For us it mostly was not, because the capital was already in the country before we needed it, so the FC-GPR reporting was lighter than the warnings suggest. That was the pattern I kept seeing: the thing that flattens one founder waves another one through, and which is which depends on details of your situation that no general guide can know.

If there is one thing I would put above all the others, it is that the rules do not hold still. GST rates move. FSSAI requirements get revised. Something that was true when you built your process quietly stops being true, and nobody sends you a note. Our pastries sit at five percent and plain bread at nil, and even that line has shifted around us more than once. The work is not learning the rules once. It is noticing when they have changed, which is a different and more tiring kind of work, and it does not end after setup. It is the running cost of operating here.

So here is the order I wish someone had given me, not as a checklist but as an order of operations. Decide the entity and the resident-director question first, because it constrains everything after. Incorporate. Then start the slow, queue-based things immediately, the FSSAI license above all, and treat them as something you actively push rather than submit and wait on, because submitted and waiting is how they sink. Start the bank account and the payment gateway early too, because that is its own long pole: the account can take months no one can explain, and every gateway now wants Aadhaar, which a foreigner does not get fast. If your capital is not yet in India, get FEMA advice early; if it is already here, you will probably find that part lighter than the warnings suggest, as we did. And assume the rules will change under you, so build the habit of checking rather than the comfort of a setup you trust.

Which brings me to who you actually need. You need a chartered accountant and a company secretary, and at some point an advocate, and you need them to be good, because the things only they can legally do, the audited accounts, the certified filings, the FEMA certificates, the legal opinions, are the things you cannot do yourself and should not try to. That part is genuinely reserved, and that is fine. What you do not need is to hand over the judgment with it. The CA can file your GST. The CA cannot tell you, with any feeling for your specific situation, whether to enter India at all, in what order to do the next six things, or what is about to go wrong. That part is not for sale, because almost nobody selling India setup has run a company here. They processed the paperwork for the people who did.

I keep coming back to that stuck FSSAI file. We got it, in the end, the way most of these things resolve, with persistence and the right follow-up and some patience. The thing I took from it was not about food licensing. It was that the distance between a company that exists and a company that works is made of dozens of these, each small, none in the brochure, and that the distance is the actual job. I am still not sure how much of what we learned transfers cleanly to a company that is not a bakery, not in food, not us. Some of it is just ours. But the shape of it, the gap between the deck and the kitchen floor, I think that part is the same for everyone who does this, and it is what I would most want to talk to the next person about before they sign anything.

We thought we had hired a driver.

The man had been showing up at the farm in Bettahalsoor for three weeks. Same time each time, friendly and neatly dressed. Same car. He drove the bakery’s orders into Bangalore, sent a WhatsApp message for every completed community, all without knowing more than maybe 10 words of english. We were paying him through a daily rate that I had negotiated upward because I had decided, in some unexamined Swedish corner of my head, that paying twice the going market rate was the responsible thing to do for a person who was now meaningfully part of how the bakery works. That was the story I was operating inside.

The driver gave me his phone and apparently it was his brother on the other side, with good English. The conversation lasted about four minutes. By the end of it, I had understood that the man at the farm each morning does not own the car. He is paid a monthly salary by someone else, a man I had never met, who has fourteen vehicles operating across Bangalore on more or less the same arrangement. The 2x daily rate I was so pleased with had not been reaching the person I imagined I was paying. It had been reaching the man with fourteen cars.

I sat with that for a few hours, feeling angry and cheated, before I could see clearly what had actually been happening.

The Swedish operating system told me there was a problem here. The Indian one tells me there is a system.

The Swedish frame

In Sweden, when you pay another adult to perform work, the system asks one question above all others. Did the person you paid hold F-skatt status at the time of payment? F-skatt is the formal tax registration that says “this person is a contractor and handles their own tax.” If they don’t have it, the law treats you as the de facto employer, with all the obligations that come with that classification: social charges, holiday allowance, occupational injury, sick pay liability. The architecture is built on the assumption that you always know who you are paying, and what their relationship to you is. Eighty percent of the Swedish workforce is covered by collective bargaining agreements (kollektivavtal); for the rest, the F-skatt test does the work. Bilateral. Identifiable. Two named parties, on the record.

This is the operating model I brought to Bangalore. Not consciously, because nobody examines the operating system they grew up inside. The model just runs.

The Swedish word for it, the one I keep reaching for, is ordning och reda. Order and tidiness, roughly, but not quite. It is closer to a world arranged so that every adult is accountable to identifiable other adults, and the trail of payment matches the trail of responsibility. It is the same instinct that makes a Swedish supermarket place every product on a shelf with its origin and its sourcing written on the label, and a Swedish company believe that publishing the salary band of every role is the obvious thing to do. The trail is supposed to be legible.

The story I had been telling myself about the driver was a small enactment of that instinct. I had named a person. I had paid him directly, I thought. I had paid him more than the rate, because the rate seemed low. I had been doing the Swedish thing. And I had been wrong about almost every load-bearing element of it.

The layer that has been here for two hundred years

There is a paper called “Sardars, Jobbers, Kanganies,” written in 2008 by the economic historian Tirthankar Roy and published in Modern Asian Studies. The first thing that struck me when I read it last weekend was the bibliography. The figure I had been discovering this week, the man with fourteen cars who supplies labour and vehicles and absorbs the operational risk and takes a margin in the middle, is not new. He has names in every region of India. In Bombay he was the jobber or muqadam. In the eastern plantations he was the sardar. In the south he was the kangany. Roy’s argument is that these names describe the same load-bearing function: a single intermediary who handled recruitment, discipline, housing, credit, and wage distribution for the actual employer, and was the only legible interface the colonial mill, the railway, or the plantation ever needed to deal with.

That was in the 1880s. In 2024, a paper appeared in the Indian Journal of Labour Economics by two researchers, Parvathy and Kamath, with a title that gives the whole game away: “Labour Contractors (Thekedaars) to Human Resource Companies.” Their argument is that the function has not changed in 140 years. The thekedaar has become more legally sophisticated, sometimes wears a polo shirt, sometimes operates as a registered Staffing Solutions firm. But the role has not moved. The same person still does the matching, the screening, the housing, the wage transfer, and the replacement when somebody doesn’t show up. He is the layer through which Indian urban labour has been organised, with brief interruptions, for as long as urban Indian labour has existed.

The Periodic Labour Force Survey, released in September 2024, puts more than ninety percent of India’s workforce in informal employment. Fifty-eight percent of regular wage and salary earners have no written contract. The category my Swedish operating system kept asking for, the bilateral identified on-the-record relationship, is the exception in this economy, not the norm.

This is not chaos. It is structure. It is not even informal in the way the word implies in English. It is differently formal. The matching is real, the screening is real, the credit lines are real, the replacement logistics are real. They are simply not held inside the firm. They are held inside a man with fourteen cars.

The honest concession

Here is the part I have been writing around.

The story I told myself, when I first understood the arrangement, was the easy story. The contractor was extracting rent. The driver was being underpaid. The 2x rate was being skimmed at the middle. The whole thing was a kind of mild injustice that had been hidden from me, and now that I had seen it I was implicated.

That story is partly true. The Dutch sociologist Jan Breman, who has spent fifty years on Indian informal labour, makes the case that the contractor layer structurally suppresses wages by inserting a party whose profit depends precisely on the spread between what the principal pays and what the worker receives. Breman is right that this is the mechanism. So part of the layer is rent extraction, exactly as the cynical reading would have it.

But the story I told myself was easy in a more specific way. It centred my own discovery.

The Indian Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition) Act of 1970, in its Section 21, says something my Swedish instinct had not allowed for. If I had hired the driver directly, on the basis that I wanted to remove the middleman, I would not have been removing the legal employer. I would have been becoming the legal employer. Provident Fund obligations. ESI registration. Notice period protections under the Shops and Establishments Act. Gratuity liability after five years. The contractor was not a layer between me and a relationship I was entitled to have. Under Indian law, the contractor was the relationship. He was the worker’s employer. He was not standing in the way of something; he was holding something I had not even priced.

The 2x daily rate I had been so quietly pleased with was, to a degree I had not done the arithmetic on, the price of a service I was buying. Vehicle. Replacement when a vehicle broke down. PF and ESI absorbed elsewhere. Coordination. Availability on a date I had not yet asked for. The contractor had been doing real work. Not all of his margin was rent. Some of it was the work of being the addressable party for a worker who in the Swedish system would have an address and in the Indian one does not.

Susan Leigh Star, the American sociologist, wrote that infrastructure becomes visible at the moment it breaks. The infrastructure I had been operating inside had not broken. My mental model of it had. The discovery I felt I had made was not really about labour intermediation in Bangalore. It was about the silent operating system I had carried with me from a country where the question “who are you paying” has a single recoverable answer, into a country where it has at least three.

The question I am still sitting with

The American sociologist Rina Agarwala did three hundred interviews with informal workers across India for a book she published in 2013. Her surprising finding, the one that has stayed with me since I read it, is that India’s informal workers have largely stopped demanding rights from their employer. They demand welfare benefits from the state instead. They organise as citizens by neighbourhood, not as workers by shop floor. Her interpretation is that the employer is not, in this economy, a legible enough counterparty to be the right address for a rights claim. The state, which cannot move or hide, has become the de facto counterparty by default.

Read that against the Swedish architecture and something cracks. The Swedish system presupposes that the employer is the first and most accountable address. The Indian system, in significant practical terms, presupposes that he is not. These are not two versions of the same economy with different efficiency levels. They are two different theories of where adult responsibility sits.

I do not know which is right. I think the Swedish system encodes a kind of trygghet that the Indian one does not, and I think the Indian system encodes a kind of flexibility and risk-absorption that the Swedish one cannot afford. I think the discomfort I feel when I look at the layer is partly real ethics and partly an immune response from the operating system I grew up inside, and I have not yet untangled which is which.

What I know is that next month, when we re-negotiate, we will probably still be paying the man with fourteen cars. I will probably ask him for more transparency on what fraction of the rate reaches the driver. He will probably tell me what he chooses to tell me. The arrangement will probably continue in something close to its current shape, because nothing I have learned in this last week gives me a better design.

Twenty years of supply chain work tells me that systems that have survived 140 years of social change without breaking are usually doing more work than they look like they are doing, and that a foreigner two years into a country is a very specific kind of unreliable narrator about what that work actually is.

I will probably write about this again in a year, when we have hired and lost a few more people, and the story I am telling myself now will look as small as the story I was telling myself three weeks ago.

A brown envelope arrived in early April. Inside, the FSSAI manufacturer and retailer license for Scandinavian Food and Beverages Pvt Ltd, the company my co-founder Niklas and I incorporated last August to run Fika B’lore from a solar-powered farmhouse north of Bangalore. License number 11226302000578. The certificate, printed in the same officious typeface used by every regulator I’ve dealt with in this country, carried a small confidence at the bottom: Valid Until: 01 April 2027. It isn’t.

Three weeks earlier, on March 13, the Ministry of Health had approved perpetual validity for FSSAI licenses, ending periodic renewals for food businesses across India. The certificate in my hands, dated April 2, was one of the first issued under the new regime. The “Valid Until” line was a printing artifact. The form had not caught up to the rule. I filed the certificate in a folder, made a note in the company log, and went back to that morning’s WhatsApp orders.

I have started to think this is the actual texture of building a small business in India. Not the regulation itself. The gap between the regulation on paper and the regulation in your hand.

Malmö assumes the first ledger is the real one. Bangalore knows the second is.

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Stewart Brand has a frame that has helped me more than any India-specific business book. He calls it pace layering. Civilisations, he argues, are made of six layers, each moving at a different speed. Fashion is the fastest. Then Commerce. Then Infrastructure. Then Governance. Then Culture. Nature is the slowest. Fast learns, slow remembers, he writes. Fast proposes, slow disposes. The tension between the layers is what makes a society work. If they all moved at the same speed, you’d have either a coup or a museum, not a country.

In Brand’s frame, Governance sits in the middle. It’s supposed to move slowly enough to be predictable, but fast enough to receive upward pressure from Commerce when the operating reality has changed. Sweden has spent the last fifty years pretending Governance is a slow layer. India is busy proving it’s a middle layer.

In our first eight months as a company, the regime around us has changed at least three times. Three weeks after we incorporated, the GST Council collapsed India’s tax slabs from four into two and moved bakery products from 18% to 5%. The cost stack of every order we’d ever priced changed in a single Council session. In November, India notified the rules under the DPDP Act, the country’s GDPR cousin, with a compliance runway that ends in May 2027. In March, the Ministry of Health made FSSAI licenses perpetual, ending the renewal cycle that had been a fixture of food regulation for two decades. We are a three-person operation, and the regime under us has been rewritten in three different domains in less time than it took us to set up our HDFC current account.

A Swedish operator reading that paragraph will read it as instability. I read it as a system doing what Brand says systems are supposed to do. Commerce moved fast in this country for a decade. Governance is now catching up. The regime is volatile because the regime is responsive. The fact that you can call your CA on a Tuesday, learn your tax category has changed, and be operating under the new rate by the next billing cycle is not a bug. In Brand’s frame, it is what a healthy middle layer looks like.

This is the part Malmö tends to miss.

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I should be careful not to romanticise it. The pace cuts both ways, and the same year we benefited from GST 2.0 we have also been working alongside a registry that has gone in the opposite direction. India’s trademark examination queue lengthened from roughly thirty days in early 2024 to about 550 days now. We filed our marks in February 2026 through a Chennai advocate; we expect to hear back in 2027 at the earliest. The corporate filing system, MCA21, was modernised in the same window: routine forms that took days now clear in hours. The intellectual property registry didn’t move at all. Reform here is sectoral and asynchronous, not a single tide. A Swedish operator assuming the Malmö frame of “system-wide good or system-wide stagnant” will read MCA21 V3 and assume the trademark queue must be similar. It isn’t.

The harder version of this argument was made by Andy Mukherjee in Bloomberg this January, in a column called The Great Unease of Doing Business in India. His thesis: India has improved on every reform metric for a decade, and yet operators on the ground report no real change in friction. Permits still take longer than they should. Notices still arrive without warning. The reform looks tidy in a press release and stays untidy in a kitchen.

There is also the older shadow. The Cairn Energy retrospective tax case, in which India ran a 2012 amendment backwards to demand 1.6 billion dollars on a 2006 group restructure. The Vodafone case and the 2018 e-commerce FDI policy belong to the same family. The Indian state has the capacity, occasionally, to change its mind in a way that costs an operator hundreds of millions of dollars and several years of arbitration. None of this contradicts the pace-layer argument. It sharpens it. India’s Governance layer is fast because it is still under upward pressure from Commerce, and an immature middle layer sometimes overshoots.

The other complication is that the official regime is only one layer of operating reality. We hired a delivery driver in April. His name appears on no contract because, it turned out, he doesn’t have one with us. He is salaried by Ramesh, who runs a fleet of fourteen cars, and Ramesh pays the driver out of the daily rate we pay him. We negotiated the arrangement with Ramesh in person. The work will happen, was the phrase he used, and so far the work happens. The papers we have describe a relationship we do not actually have. There is a whole layer of Indian commerce that operates underneath the regime any reformist agency can see, and the official regime, however fast it moves, never quite reaches it. James C. Scott calls this metis: practical knowledge embedded in local networks that resists state-level legibility. You can modernise the MCA filing system every year. The fleet of fourteen will adapt around it.

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I have come to think a Swedish operator looking at India needs two clocks running, not one.

The first clock is Malmö time. In Sweden, you build a business for the rules that are already written. The aktiebolag registration takes a week. Skatteverket’s processes are slow but predictable. The EU keeps producing directives, and they keep being slightly heavier than the last set, and you incorporate them the way a forest incorporates each new fall of leaves. You design for stability. The penalty for inattention is small, because nothing important changes on a quarterly basis.

The second clock is the one I have started to learn here. In India, you build a business for the regime that is coming next. You read your CA’s monthly newsletter the way Swedes read the weather forecast. You assume your cost stack will move once a year and your compliance stack will move twice. You accept that any official regime will only describe two-thirds of your operating reality, and the rest will live in a relationship you negotiate weekly. In this country, the penalty for inattention isn’t small. It is the difference between a business that runs and a business that doesn’t.

A Swedish company thinking about expanding into India almost always brings only the first clock. The risk register treats India as a noisier version of Malmö, and the noise gets translated into either over-caution (we’ll only do this through a JV, we’ll only do this with a 24-month legal review) or under-caution (we’ll set up like we would in Copenhagen and figure the rest out). Both are wrong. Both miss the question that running a small business here forces you to answer every quarter: which regime are you actually operating under, the one on the certificate or the one in the WhatsApp thread?

The answer is usually both, and neither, and you keep two ledgers. One is the statutory ledger that the CA, the auditor, and the Registrar of Companies see. The other is the operating ledger that the kitchen, the driver, the suppliers, and the customers know. Malmö assumes the first ledger is the real one. Bangalore knows the second is. The work of running a business here is keeping the two within walking distance of each other.

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I keep the FSSAI certificate in a folder labelled Statutory Filings. The Valid Until: 01 April 2027 line is still printed at the bottom. I haven’t asked the regulator to issue a corrected version. I assume the form will catch up to the rule eventually, and in the meantime the certificate functions perfectly well as a piece of paper, which is most of what it needed to do.

The harder question I am sitting with isn’t whether India’s regime is more or less hospitable to a small Swedish-owned bakery than Sweden’s. It is whether I can encode enough of what we have actually built here, the part that lives in handshakes and a farmhouse lease and a driver who works for someone else, into a form that survives us moving back to Sweden. The paper company is easy to acquire. The other company, the one that runs on metis, isn’t on any certificate.