The World Bank Group will bring out an ‘ease of living’ index that will rank cities globally, even as it is looking at tweaking the methodology used in its country-wise ease of doing business rankings to better capture reforms being carried out in large and diverse nations like India.
The development comes at a time when the Indian government has launched a mission to help develop over 100 smart cities through a strategy that includes “city improvement (retrofitting), city renewal (redevelopment) and city extension (greenfield development) plus a pan-city initiative in which Smart Solutions are applied covering larger parts of the city.”
On the World Bank Group's Doing Business index, India had suggested that the Bank needs to take into account the reforms undertaken across the country and not just in two cities (Mumbai and Delhi) as is being considered currently for the rankings.
On the proposed ‘ease of living’ index, World Bank country director for India, Junaid Ahmad, said, “One of the moot questions is that as you move more into high income (category), urban centres become extremely important, (including for) accommodation and so on. For cities to actually generate growth, the ease of living there has got to be very important.”
“We [World Bank] have been working on it [‘ease of living’ index for cities] for several years now,” Mr. Ahmad said.
The index could include categories on social inclusion, cost of living, public transport, housing, education, health, environment-friendliness, crime/safety, governance and corruption, etc.
Criticism from IndiaOn the criticism regarding the World Bank Doing Business Report this year ranking India a lowly 130th despite several reforms carried out by the government, Mr. Ahmad said the rankings did not capture important reforms, including the laws on Goods & Services Tax (GST) and insolvency & bankrupcty as they did not come before the cut off date for this year.
However, he added, “Our methodology is a methodology. That had led to interesting response(s) by different countries. We have learnt that the complexity of understanding of doing business needs to change. So our methodology will evolve as we are doing it right now.”
Agreeing that the existing methodology could be tweaked to better capture reforms in big countries like India, he said, “everything is dynamic, you learn, you change, you shift. There is no one fixed approach. It is always a challenge for any bureaucracy including ours to learn and to adjust.”
Pointing out that India has made vast improvements in each of the categories and sub-categories that are part of the overall ease of doing business ranking, he said when reforms like the GST and bankruptcy & insolvency are included in next year’s rankings, India’s rank will improve vastly.
Economic Affairs Secretary Shaktikanta Das had recently said that the law on bankruptcy & insolvency is likely to be effective by this December-end, adding that the government is also determined to introduce the GST by April next year.
