Expressing optimism over improvement in India’s business ranking, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has said efforts will be made to further simplify Goods and Services Tax (GST). She added that it will help in further improving India’s ranking in the World Bank’s (WB) ease of doing business index. India has jumped 14 places to rank 63rd out of 190 countries in the WB’s Doing Business 2020 report on account of significant improvement in resolving insolvency and obtaining construction permits. The other parameters where the country has done well include trading across borders, registering property, paying taxes, getting electricity connections and starting a business. However, the improvement in the remaining three parameters - getting credit, protecting minority investors, enforcing contracts - are not impressive.
The Minister said that the effort will be now to achieve the target to reaching within top 50 rank. She added that as there is just one rank improvement in the parameter of starting a business, enough effort will be made to improve on this scale, as it is a ‘very critical’ in a cycle of an industry. She said ‘in GST, it is an ongoing process to understand where the difficulties are…We are also looking at what were the glitches in using online filing of returns. So, GST is an ongoing process in improving. Even now for the next meeting, as and when it happens, we want to make sure that several steps are taken to simplify compliance.’ On income tax front, she said ‘At this stage, there may not be much to say’.
Sitharaman further said from next year two more cities - Kolkata and Bengaluru - will be included in the preparation of the ranking index. Currently, the report covers Delhi and Mumbai. She said ‘till now two cities in India were covered all these years. For a large country and regional diversity being so distinct, we were impressing upon the World Bank that having just two cities may not be adequately representative. So, from the coming year Kolkata and Bengaluru will be added to the list of cities.’ With this, the World Bank will take views of industry from these two cities while formulating the ranking index. She said that ‘there is a significant jump in the parameter of resolving insolvency, but that does not make me complacent’.
