MANISH GUPTA
Ranchi, July 1: Jharkhand slipped majorly in terms of all India Ease of Doing Business (EoDB) ranking released by Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Thursday from an inspiring fifth position in the last ranking to somewhere between 14 and 20.
Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Haryana, Karnataka, Punjab, Tamil Nadu and Telangana are the ‘Top Achievers’ based on implementation of Business Reforms Action Plan (BRAP) in the states and Union Territories (UTs), the Union Ministry of Commerce and Industry said in a statement.
The second category, labelled ‘Achievers’, named six states and these are Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Odisha, Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh. Jharkhand is in the third category called ‘Aspirers’ with six other states namely Assam, Chhattisgarh, Goa, Kerala, Rajasthan and West Bengal.
After coming out with the ranking of states and Union Territories (UTs) based on their performance in implementation of BRAP for 2015, 2016, 2017-18 and 2019, the fifth edition of the BRAP exercise based on performance in 2020 discontinued the ranking system. Instead, the states have been put in four various categories.
The last EoDB ranking, released in September 2020 based on performance in 2019, had placed Jharkhand at the fifth position after Andhra Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Telangana and Madhya Pradesh.
“The business environment has certainly degraded in the state. The major hindrance has been the unfriendly business policies drafted by the officers who along with their political class have no business experience but still desist from interacting with us and listening to our issues,” said Federation of Jharkhand Chamber of Commerce and Industries (FJCCI) Secretary Rahul Maroo.
The Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT), under the Union Ministry of Commerce and Industry, which releases BRAP, or the EoDB ranking, has collected feedback from the businesses (the actual users) on the quality of implementation of the reforms in respective states/UTs.
FJCCI President Dheeraj Taneja recently said that the Single Window System (SWS) was “absolutely defunct” with no timelines for various clearances from the respective departments. Despite filing the applications on SWS, the businessmen have to chase each department for the clearances, he said.
The difference between various states was so small that it did not make sense to rank them but rather put them in various categories, the Ministry said. Instead of hierarchy amongst the states/ UTs, it wanted an enabling framework wherein learning can be shared with good practices spilling over nationwide, it added.
Andaman & Nicobar, Bihar, Chandigarh, Daman & Diu and Dadra & Nagar Haveli, Delhi, Jammu & Kashmir, Manipur, Meghalaya, Nagaland, Puducherry and Tripura have been clubbed under the ‘Emerging Business Ecosystems’ category. Five states/ UTs namely Sikkim, Mizoram, Arunachal Pradesh, Lakshadweep and Ladakh were not listed due to insufficient user data.
