India still needs to work on easing the task of starting a business to further improve the country’s ranking in the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business Index, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley wrote in a blog on Thursday.
India jumped 23 places in the Ease of Doing Business rankings for 2019 to rank 77 from rank 100 in the previous year’s report.
“On ‘Payment of Taxes’ and ‘Resolving Insolvency’, the GST and the NCLT mechanisms are in place,” Mr. Jaitley wrote. “Early results seem to be quite encouraging and when this full year’s performance is taken into consideration, it would be logical to assume that we will move up significantly in these two categories.”
“The other area where India has to make a special effort to further improve is in relation to ‘starting a business’,” he added. “Current year, our ranking of 137 has improved by 21 position in the last four years. It is still not a satisfactory position. There are several processes which are relevant both at the level of the Central Government and the State Governments. Much improvement is required in these areas.”
Regarding the ‘enforcement of contracts’ category, the Finance Minister said that the Specific Relief Act had been amended to make the Act enforceable. He added that commercial courts had been set up in different districts of the country and that the Arbitration Act had been amended to provide for expeditious arbitrations and the least judicial intervention.
“In each of these criteria, there has to be an emphasis on reducing the time period for any business activity, reducing the cost involved and cutting down the number of procedures,” Mr. Jaitley said. “This by itself is not formidable task. If we are able to keep the present pace of reforms in the above areas, the targets set by the Prime Minister [of breaking into the top 50 in the Index] would start looking a modest one.”
