---
title: "How long does an Indian company actually last?"
description: "Of the 14,75,643 companies and LLPs registered in India before 2015, 7,31,186 have since been struck off. Survival rates by year of incorporation and by state, from the register itself."
author: "Pradeep Vanga"
published: 2026-09-17
updated: 2026-09-17
category: "Analysis"
tags: ["register-data", "strike-off", "company-status", "analysis"]
canonical: https://entiva.in/blog/company-survival-rate-india/
publisher: "Entiva"
---

# How long does an Indian company actually last?

There are 37,60,338 companies and LLPs on India's register, and about a quarter
of them have been struck off. That much has been
[written about before](https://entiva.in/blog/how-many-companies-in-india-are-still-active/),
including here.

It is also the least interesting way to read the number, because it mixes a
company incorporated in 1989 with one incorporated last Tuesday. The second one
has not had time to fail.

Ask the question the other way round. Take every company registered in a
single year, and ask what has become of that year's intake since. The register
answers that, and the answer is worse than a quarter.

## Almost half of everything registered before 2015 is gone

Of the 14,75,643 companies and LLPs registered before 2015, **7,31,186 have
been struck off**. That is 49.6%.

Gone from the register, which is not the same thing as having failed in
business. Hold that distinction, because further down it turns out to explain
most of the number.

As the [company-status guide explains](https://entiva.in/blog/company-status-strike-off-meaning/),
strike-off is not dormancy. A company with that status has been removed from
the register and stands dissolved, whatever its website, its letterhead or its
GST number still says. What does not disappear with it is the money: section
248 keeps the company's assets available for its liabilities, and the liability
of its directors and officers continues as if it had never been dissolved.

The rate by year of incorporation:

| Registered in | Registered | Still active | Struck off |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1989 | 22,085 | 7,350 | 58.8% |
| 1995 | 59,405 | 21,390 | 55.1% |
| 2000 | 32,376 | 11,596 | 54.4% |
| 2008 | 70,329 | 34,875 | 42.0% |
| 2014 | 81,476 | 41,629 | 45.2% |
| 2020 | 1,80,271 | 1,45,040 | 18.5% |
| 2024 | 2,38,712 | 2,33,458 | 1.7% |

The peak is 1989, at 58.8%, and the years around it sit within a point or two.
This is a plateau across the late 1980s and early 1990s rather than one bad
year.

## The recent years are not good news

The obvious reading of that table is that companies registered recently are
doing better. They are not. They are younger.

Removal is not a penalty for a late return. Section 248 of the Companies Act
2013 lets the registrar strike a company off when it has not carried on any
business or operation for the two immediately preceding financial years and has
not applied for dormant status, or when it never commenced business within a
year of incorporation. A long filing gap is usually the evidence of that rather
than the trigger itself, and the registrar still has to act on it. A company
incorporated in 2024 has had time for neither.

So the curve after about 2015 is measuring how long removal takes, not how
long companies last. Any comparison between a 1995 cohort and a 2020 cohort is
a comparison between a finished story and one in its first chapter. The recent
rows in the table above belong to that unfinished part of the record.

## Most of this is one clean-up drive, not a mortality curve

Here is the part the register itself cannot tell you, because it records what a
company is now and never when it changed.

After demonetisation the Ministry of Corporate Affairs ran a special drive to
clear dormant companies off the register. Answering a question in the Lok Sabha
in January 2018, the Minister of State for Corporate Affairs
[said](https://www.pib.gov.in/newsite/PrintRelease.aspx?relid=175412&reg=48&lang=2)
that registrars had identified 2.97 lakh companies during 2017-18 that had not
filed financial statements or annual returns for two or more consecutive
financial years and were prima facie not conducting any business, and had
already removed **2,26,166** of them as on 19 December 2017. A later answer in
the Rajya Sabha
[put the drive at 3,82,581 companies over three years](https://www.pib.gov.in/Pressreleaseshare.aspx?PRID=1656923&reg=3&lang=2),
identified the same way.

Our snapshot holds 9,49,805 entities at Strike Off. On the government's own
numbers, roughly **two in five of them were removed in that single three-year
drive**.

That reframes the 49.6%. A company incorporated in 1993 that quietly stopped
trading in 1999 sat on the register as Active for eighteen years and was
removed in 2018. In this data it is indistinguishable from one that collapsed
last year. The strike-off count is a record of when the registrar caught up,
not of when businesses died.

Two things follow, and both cut against the easy reading:

- The real failure rate for the older cohorts is **higher** than 49.6%, not
  lower. Companies that stopped trading before the sweep but were not caught by
  it are still sitting at Active.
- The timing of removal is a policy decision. A different government with a
  different appetite for register hygiene would produce a different curve from
  the same underlying businesses.

Voluntary departure is a rounding error by comparison. The Easy Exit Scheme ran
twice, in 2010 and 2011, and
[35,174 companies used it](https://pib.gov.in/newsite/PrintRelease.aspx?relid=101942);
Fast Track Exit had been used by 11,623 more by the end of 2013. Around 47,000
companies chose to leave, against 3,82,581 shown the door.

One oddity we are not going to explain away: the recent years are not smooth.
The 2017 cohort shows 28.4% struck off while 2018 shows 11.6% and 2016 shows
18.9%. The obvious candidate is the ground now at section 248(1)(d), for
subscribers who never paid up, but that was inserted with effect from November
2018 and does not cleanly reach companies incorporated in 2017. We would rather
leave it open than reach for the nearest plausible mechanism.

## Where you register matters, or at least correlates

Among states with at least 20,000 entities on the register, the share struck
off runs from 42.5% to 16.4%.

| State | On the register | Struck off |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Chandigarh | 20,752 | 42.5% |
| Delhi | 5,10,590 | 32.4% |
| Tamil Nadu | 2,54,855 | 32.2% |
| Punjab | 57,763 | 31.1% |
| West Bengal | 2,94,273 | 27.8% |
| Chhattisgarh | 21,465 | 19.4% |
| Haryana | 1,35,195 | 17.7% |
| Bihar | 82,238 | 17.4% |
| Uttarakhand | 24,201 | 16.4% |

Read this carefully, because it is the easiest table on the page to
misinterpret. A state's share depends on when its companies were registered.
Somewhere that saw most of its incorporations in the last five years will look
healthy whatever happens to those companies, and somewhere with a long tail of
1990s registrations will look poor. Delhi and Tamil Nadu have deep back
catalogues. Uttarakhand, formed in 2000, does not.

The share is a fact about each state's register. It is not a ranking of where
companies survive, and nothing here establishes a cause.

The same figures, one level down, are on the
[district pages](https://entiva.in/companies-in/): what each district holds, and how much of its
pre-2015 intake has gone.

## What this changes for you

If you are checking a counterparty, the base rate is worth carrying in your
head. A company incorporated in the 1990s and still Active today is in the
surviving half of its cohort, and it survived a registrar actively looking for
companies like it. That is genuinely informative, and it is free to check.

The [separate industry analysis](https://entiva.in/blog/which-industries-have-most-struck-off-companies-india/)
asks whether those rates also differ by the activity code in a company's CIN.

What the base rate cannot do is tell you about the company in front of you.
Status is a legal state, not a health check: Active means the registrar has not
removed it, not that it trades, pays its suppliers, or has filed anything this
decade. A company can sit at Active for years while quietly not filing, which
is the state that precedes strike-off rather than the opposite of it. The
[annual filing record](https://entiva.in/blog/company-not-filing-annual-returns-what-it-means/)
is where that shows up, and it is in the filings rather than the register
summary. [What the filings hold](https://entiva.in/what-you-can-find/) is the next question, and
it is a different one from anything a base rate can answer.

## Where these numbers come from

Every figure above is a count of the Ministry of Corporate Affairs company
master data, taken state by state from the Ministry's own register on
18 September 2026 and stated there as on 6 August 2026. No sampling, no modelling, no third-party database:
37,60,338 rows, counted. The calculation is reproducible in
`scripts/register_survival.py`.

The strike-off drive figures are not ours. They are what ministers told
Parliament, in the two written replies linked above, and they count companies
where our column counts companies and LLPs together. Removals later set aside
by the Tribunal are netted out of neither.

Two limits travel with the snapshot. It is one dated moment, so a company
struck off the week after still reads Active here. And entities with an unusable
incorporation date, 2,296 of them, are excluded from the year tables and
included in the register total.

An earlier version of this analysis counted a different published copy of the
same register, and the Chhattisgarh row above is the reason it does not any
more. **That copy omits Chhattisgarh's companies altogether**, carrying a single
entity with a Chhattisgarh CIN where the Ministry's own figures give 21,465,
registered between 1934 and 2026. They are not filed under a neighbouring state
either: Madhya Pradesh differs between the two by about two thousand, the
ordinary gap between two dates, not by twenty-one thousand reassigned
companies. The lesson generalises past this one state. A state table is only as
complete as the copy underneath it, and a copy can agree with its own published
total while a whole state is missing from it.

## Frequently asked

### What share of Indian companies get struck off?

Across the whole register, 9,49,805 of 37,60,338 entities carry the status Strike Off, which is 25.3%. That figure understates the rate for any given cohort, because it includes companies registered too recently to have been removed yet. Of the entities registered before 2015, 7,31,186 of 14,75,643 have been struck off, or 49.6%.

### How long does a company survive in India?

The register does not record a lifespan, only a current status, so this cannot be answered directly. What it shows is how much of each year's intake has since been removed: 58.8% of the 1989 cohort, 54.4% of 2000, 42.0% of 2008 and 45.2% of 2014. The older the cohort the more of it has gone, though not smoothly, and cohorts from about 2015 on are too young to compare.

### Why have so many Indian companies been struck off?

Mostly one clean-up drive rather than a wave of business failure. After demonetisation the Ministry of Corporate Affairs ran a special drive against dormant companies, identifying them by non-filing of financial statements for two or more consecutive years. Registrars removed 2,26,166 companies by 19 December 2017 and 3,82,581 over three years, which is roughly two in five of every entity now showing Strike Off. Many of those companies had stopped trading years before they were removed, so the count records when the registrar caught up rather than when a business ended.

### Which Indian state has the most struck-off companies?

By share, among states with at least 20,000 entities, Chandigarh is highest at 42.5%, followed by Delhi at 32.4% and Tamil Nadu at 32.2%. Uttarakhand is lowest at 16.4%. These are shares of each state's own register, not counts.

## Related reading

- [How many companies in India actually still exist?](https://entiva.in/blog/how-many-companies-in-india-are-still-active/): More than 3.7 million entities sit on India's companies register. Only 70.7% are Active, and more than a quarter have been struck off. Here is the full status breakdown.
- [What a company's status actually means: Active, Strike Off, Dormant](https://entiva.in/blog/company-status-strike-off-meaning/): A company's status on the register is one word that changes everything about whether you should sign. Here's what each one means, and what to do next.
- [Which kinds of Indian company are struck off most often?](https://entiva.in/blog/which-industries-have-most-struck-off-companies-india/): An analysis of 14,44,721 older Indian companies finds computer-related businesses were struck off more often than their age alone predicts.

_Published by Entiva (https://entiva.in/), which retrieves documents from the Ministry of Corporate Affairs' View Public Documents service on a customer's behalf. Entiva is not affiliated with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs and does not resell another provider's database. Free lookups use MCA company master data._