Modi regime can raise India’s ‘Doing Business’ ranking: World Bank chief

The World Bank has expressed confidence that with the Narendra Modi-led Government at the Centre, India’s ranking in ‘Doing Business’ can improve significantly. The Bank also said it would lend $15-18 billion over the next three years.

“If the ranking of India in the ‘Doing Business’ report was based just on Gujarat, it would improve 50 places in the ranking. So, our hope is that what PM Modi did in Gujarat to improve the business environment can be scaled to all over India.

“And if that does happen, India will rise very quickly in the ranking of ‘Doing Business’,” World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim said in a press conference after meeting Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

India currently ranks 134 among 189 countries in the World Bank’s ‘Doing Business’ report, three notches down from its rank in 2012.

Kim, who also met Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Wednesday, said there was optimism across the board. “I emerge from the meeting today even more optimistic than I was while flying into the country. I was extremely impressed with his (Modi’s) sense of urgency.

“I was extremely impressed with his understanding of what it takes to execute and deliver at the end of the day, not just have policy and pronouncements but actually deliver, and his understanding of how you lead in times of stress,” he said. On his meeting with the Prime Minister, Kim said that Modi was very clear in the sense that money was important, but what he really stressed on was that he wanted the kind of insight, the kind of data, the kind of analysis that can help him achieve his extremely high aspiration for the people of India.

While committing $15-18 billion to the Government over a period of three years, International Finance Corporation (a World Bank-group entity which gives money to the private sector through equity and debt) has assured at least $3.5 billion during the same period.

India is the largest client for the World Bank group, which committed a total of $6.4 billion to the country in 2013-14 (July-June)