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India hopes to rise up the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business index further next year by improving its performance in categories such as paying taxes and insolvency recovery, Department of Industrial Policy & Promotion Secretary Ramesh Abhishek has said.
“Although we have a broad vision to rise to the position to 50 and then to 25 eventually in the index, it is difficult to set a target for next year. We have progressed so far without a yearly target and we will continue to do so,” Abhishek told BusinessLine .
India jumped 23 positions in the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business Index and is now ranked 77. The World Bank ranks 190 countries on the basis of 10 indicators of which India improved its performance in six.
Commenting on India’s performance in the area of starting a business, where there was improvement in ranking but the country was still lagging at 137th position, the Secretary said that competition in the area was very tough. “To start a business, we have reduced the number of procedures to 10. However, we have to bring it down to 2 to be in the top 25-30 ranks and 1 to feature in the top 10. We are working hard to improve and will continue to do so, but competition is tough,” he said.
Contract enforcement
In the area of enforcement of contracts, the Secretary pointed out that while commercial courts have now been set up in Delhi and Mumbai after a change in the legal provision which disallowed it, cases were getting transferred to these courts. However, whether it would translate into improvement in ranking depended on time taken for resolution of the cases, he said.
Things may not be so difficult to improve in the area of payment of taxes. “Last year, GST was implemented in July, and the period July-December was taken into consideration by the World Bank when initial pains of implementation were being felt. For the next ranking, the period of January-December 2018 will be taken into consideration and we are hopeful of faring positively in the assessment,” he said.
On insolvency recovery, Abhishek was hopeful of an improvement next year as in case of some companies, large recoveries were already happening.
In registration of property, the DIPP Secretary said that while Mumbai, property records and offices were digitised, in Delhi things were still lagging as property records were held by several agencies here such as MCD, DDA, NMDC and L&DO under the Urban Development Ministry.
The top area of improvement for India this year was dealing with construction permits where ranking increased to 52 from 181. It was followed by trading across borders where India got placed at 80 this year compared to 146 earlier.
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