Ease of doing Business: Essentially an index created by three eminent economists working for world bank, a decade ago to rank counties based on their policies and systemic infrastructure to facilitate business conductive environment within the country.

  Also, a buzz term that’s being referred across the industries by all stakeholders alike though for different reasons, when used in bureaucratic circles it means focus in reforms in policies and processes to make getting into business and conducing business easier, ideally to get the country to the 5 Trillion USD GDP, but practically in short term it seems as efforts  just to improve ranking in the international reports on ease of doing business. For the industry it has become one of the most used term mostly in their applications in order to get attention for some special or long stalled requests usually suffering from poor policies. For B-schools an excuse to open yet another branch of specialization involving another buzz word associate “entrepreneurship”.

A lot is happening in government and bureaucratic circles across all the stakeholders be it central, state bodies, not only in terms of easing out the business registration, but also in many other important and meaningful ways, such as

·       Government funded VC funds.

·       Incubation centres run by various state and central government bodies.

·       Single window clearance system at state and central government level for licenses grants and approvals for various industrial processes.

·       Making finance easier through various govt. loan schemes specific to new businesses.

·       Introduction of Online application processes for better visibility and transparency.

·       Various State government drive on “Ease of Doing Business”.

·       Strengthening of anti-corruption framework.

This ecosystem is getting further strengthening by private partnership specially through some key initiatives taken up by educational institutions in last couple of years with more focus on developing entrepreneurs through entrepreneurship aligned courses and institute-run incubation centres and mentorship programmes.

All said and done, true feedback can only be taken from the end users experience of the above-mentioned initiatives as beneficiaries, and general feedback that can be gathered from industry is “things are getting better, still leaving a room for lot of reforms to make EoDB a relaity” and reality is, you still need expert hand-holding when it comes to doing hassle free business in India

About Author: Author of this article is a technocrat associated with Indian manufacturing sector for over 2 decades, having worked over a decade for steel making and another for civil and mining explosives industry, which are both heavily licensed industry, Author managed  Regulatory affairs for his last employer working very closely with MoC&I, DGFT, DGCA and SPCBCs to name a few and thus have some first-hand understanding on latest happenings on the matter.

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