Ganesh Krishnan, founder of AiHello.com, has responded to Flexport CEO Ryan Petersen’s remarks about India’s export system by recounting his own ordeal. Ryan recently said that India’s paperwork process was worse than the rest of the world combined.
Krishnan said Ryan was ‘too generous’ in his observation and that it had taken 18 months for him to ship a sample from India, compared to just 24 hours from China.
“The last shipment was returned as the CEO stamp was ‘round’ not ‘square’ so they couldn’t ‘verify the authenticity’,” Krishnan wrote on X. “It has cost one of our ecommerce clients 22 different documents, 3 bank visits, 2 flights, 5 attestations, 7 GST documents, 2 AD codes (whatever this means), 3 video verification calls and 2 shipment returns for ONE single sample export.”
“Life has easy, medium, hard, ultra mode. Only Indian bureaucracy will give you ‘dystopian nightmare’ mode,” he added, saying his first recommendation to clients sourcing from India is to consider alternate suppliers in China or Vietnam.
Krishnan’s post came after Petersen directly replied to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s July 1 message celebrating eight years of GST. Modi had called the tax reform a milestone in easing compliance for businesses. Petersen, whose company operates in 89 countries, responded: “We have to file more useless paperwork in India than in all other countries combined.”
Backing both voices, Garuda Prakashan founder Sankrant Sanu wrote: “GST may be a reform but there is much further to do. India is a nightmare of regulation and paperwork.”
Krishnan said the problem was not just with compliance but also with the structural ease of doing business. “Our experience really shows how nightmarish hard it is to shift manufacturing from China to any other country. My opinion is that American tariffs will expose more of these weaknesses.”
