Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s dream to turn the country into a top investment destination is on a positive track, with India now ranked by the World Bank at 130 of 189 countries on “Ease of Doing Business.”
India is up 12 places from its original ranking last year and four places from its rank on a revised list.
PM Modi has said that he wants to see India in the top 50 countries on the list prepared each year by the World Bank.
Calling the improvement in India’s ranking a “remarkable achievement”, World Bank Chief Economist Kaushik Basu said, “Going from 142 in the world to 130, as India has done, is very good sign. It gives a good signal about the way things are moving in India.”
The World Bank said that in May 2015, the government ended the minimum capital requirement to start a business and also terminated the requirement to obtain a certificate to start business operations, which helped it improve its rankings.
The World Bank noted that India registered the biggest increase in the distance to frontier (a measure of a country’s absolute performance) score in South Asia since 2004. The World Bank said, “More reforms are ongoing – in starting a business and other areas measured by Doing Business – though the full effects have yet to be felt.”
The World Bank hinted that India’s ranking could improve further as a number of initiatives adopted by the government have not been included in the current years’ report.
The report said, “Several other initiatives to simplify the start-up process were still ongoing on June 1, 2015, the cutoff date for this year’s data collection. These include developing a single application form for new firms and introducing online registration for tax identification numbers.”