World Bank’s ease of doing business index will cover 8 new Indian cities

The World Bank has agreed to widen the scope of the ease of doing business rankings for India by expanding it to eight more cities.

Disclosing this, Nirmala Sitharaman, minister of state (independent charge) for commerce and industry, said the move would improve the quality of the index as the survey will cover 10 cities. At present it is restricted to two cities— New Delhi and Mumbai.

India has been very keen to improve its position in the ease of doing business rankings conducted by the World Bank. At present, India is ranked 130 and is seeking to improve this to 90.

Chandrajit Banerjee, director general of the Confederation of Indian Industry, a business lobby, welcomed the move. “The index will now be more representative of the country.”

Sitharaman argued that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) is pushing for economic reforms, citing the passage of the last batch of legislations on the goods and services tax (GST) in the just concluded session of Parliament as an example.

Speaking at the India Conference in Chubu 2017 in Nagoya, Japan, Sitharaman said that Japan and India had, over the last three years, progressively deepened their relationship.

“The Japanese Prime Minister will be visiting India in the second half of the year,” she said.

During Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit in September 2014, both countries elevated ties to a strategic and global partnership.

Sitharaman argued that the deepening of the relationship was due to the ownership of it by Prime Minister Modi.

“A lot of importance is given to Japan by the Prime Minister. Even before he became PM he had great relations with Japan as the chief minister of Gujarat. That is one of the reasons why the engagement between the two countries has been on a high.”

Addressing the conference, Ramesh Abhishek, secretary, Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion, said, “Conditions are being created to push the economy into an high growth trajectory.”

In his presentation, he claimed that India’s consumer market would expand to $3.6 trillion and the country would add another 150 million people to the middle class by 2025.