Free India From Over-Regulation

India has to go beyond just policymaking and planning if it has to climb up the Ease of Doing Business ranking

- Ashish Sinha

THE ‘EASE OF DOING BUSINESS’ (EoDB) index ranks 190 countries based on the 10 indicators carrying equal weightage. Last year, India jumped to reach 100th position. But by 2022, or even before, India aims to find a spot amongst the Top 50 countries in this list. Which means India needs to do a significant amount of work across all the measurable indicators. These include increasing the tax base, improving cross-border trade, improving credit ratings, easing norms on registration of properties, faster construction permits, easier contract enforcement among others.

Freedom from Bottlenecks

In a recently concluded meeting between the private operators and the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) on ‘how to improve ease of doing business’ in the telecom sector, they listed out a number of steps that are urgently required from the governments side to improve the overall business environment. These include, providing level-playing field to private operators in public projects; imposing lower levies on all public projects awarded to private operators; rationalising tender-conditions (turnover and prior experience) to encourage startups in the telecom sector; providing low cost finance to entrepreneurs who are engaged to execute public projects among others.