Ease of biz improving, but India still has a long way to go: Mythili Bhusnurmath

Mythili Bhusnurmath, Consulting Editor, ET Now, talks about India's improvement Ease of Doing Biz rankings. Excerpts:

ET Now: What is your take on India's 12-place jump in World Bank's ease of doing business rankings?

Mythili Bhusnurmath: Although everybody is going quite gaga, the improvement is actually only from 134 to 130. It is not from 142 to 130 as it being projected, because the World Bank has changed its methodology.

It's just like the time we looked much better when we changed our GDP methodology. We certainly are better, but not as much better as a lot of people would imagine.

But I would say that we have certainly improved on a number of rankings. Most noticeably in power generation — the availability of electricity. But the ironic part is that even though our generation performance has improved dramatically — in terms of getting power connections we have moved up almost 27 ranks — the fact remains that our Discoms are in a real mess.

So, one has to take these rankings with a pinch of salt. Also remember that the World Bank did it on the basis of surveys in just two cities – Delhi and Mumbai – which is not where most people would be setting up businesses to begin with.

This is not to take away from the fact that we have done better. But there is still a great deal of scope to improve quite dramatically.

The fact that China has slipped one rank will perhaps help us feel a little better, in case we were looking for brownie points. We have improved by four while China has slipped by one. Since we always have this thing about China, it is good to know that we have overtaken them not only in GDP but also in ease of doing business.

But the fact remains that China is far ahead of us, so we need to look at how much more we need to do to catch up. So, while it is true that we have come a long way, there is still much ground to cover.