Planning panel official says Haryana topped Gujarat in terms of business and regulatory environment

NEW DELHI: While the Congress is red faced over government-commissioned surveys giving credit to the Gujarat model, a senior official has said it was Congress-ruled Haryana, and not Narendra Modi’s Gujarat, which topped a recent Planning Commission-sponsored study that evaluated states over business and regulatory environment.

The Plan panel official’s comment comes soon after the commerce and industry ministry tried to disown the report of a survey commissioned by the department of industrial policy and promotion ( DIPP).

Deloitte, which carried out the Planning Commission sponsored study, ranked Gujarat among the top states in terms of business and regulatory environment. The study itself didn’t give individual rankings to states, but the official said Haryana had performed better than BJP-ruled Gujarat.

The study, Survey on Business Regulatory Environment for Manufacturing – State Level Assessment, divided states into three categories. Four BJP-ruled states – Gujarat, Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan, and Madhya Pradesh – figured among the top nine, or the top 33.33 percentile of states. The other states in this group were Haryana, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala, Odisha and Tamil Nadu.

The grouping was done based on scores in six areas. Gujarat was in the top percentile in four categories, related to finance & tax compliances, infrastructure & utilities approvals, land & building approvals and other business regulatory compliances.

But, it fell to the bottom third in the case of labour law-related compliances and was in the middle group in the case of environment clearance.

Haryana was in the top tier on four parameters and in the middle percentile for the remaining two. The two reports have come at an embarrassingly wrong time for the Congress-led UPA government.

The Congress has been severely criticising the Gujarat model of development which Modi, the state’s chief minister and BJP’s prime ministerial candidate, has promised to take nationwide if the party forms the next government.

The DIPP-commissioned study had praised Gujarat’s land acquisition model even as the Congress party criticised Modi for giving away land at cheap rates.

“It is a private study. The study was not commissioned by the department of industrial policy and promotion. The study was submitted to DIPP by Accenture,” commerce and industry minister Anand Sharma said last week, disowning the report.