World Bank’s exercise on Ease of Doing Business and its ranking of countries were considered to be the best and the guiding factor for business world and community to invest their money to widen their business and start new venture. In India, ever since, the World Bank rated India slightly higher in ranking few years back, the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business was the hot topic that was under limelight for quite sometime. Some were using it to propagate that India is progressing and will surpass leading economies shortly. In fact, discussions and debates were there in various forums and also in print media through various articles to pass judgement that the higher the ranking of the country then higher the investment it attracts.

It was also conveyed that since India’s Ease Of doing Business ranking had improved, it will at tract more foreign Investments in various segments of business that will in turn improve the employment with quality jobs, etc.

In this persuasion, the FDI rules were changed to facilitate more flow of foreign investment. It is a matter of debate as to whether India, improving its Ease of Doing Business as per World Bank Ranking, has been able to attract the investments in job creating sectors to create quality jobs?

Now World Bank has announced that it would discontinue the practice of issuing Ease of Doing Business report and its Index since an investigation prompted data irregularities in its 2018 and 2020 editions that were released in 2017 and 2019 respectively.

The world Bank says that internal reports raised ethical matters indicating the exercise was based on manipulations and irregular data. Notably in three reports released in 2017, 2018 and 2019 India ranked among the top 10 economies showing the most notable Improvement and the latest report of World Bank published in2019 placed India at 63rdplace compared to 100 in 2017. With World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business Report under clouds, there is no need to state as to what extent other similar reports from other rating agencies can be relied upon.

With World Bank deciding to stop its ease of doing report, now questions are being raised over the credibility of World Bank’s report published so far and its ranking as to how far the report and ranking were reliable to arrive at wrong assessments.

The questions are raised as to how these reports were deliberately misleading with manipulated and irregular forged data to create a heavy impact on ruling dispensation particularly on developing and emerging economies to alter their path of growth to make policies to make poor the victims of such reports.

Above all how the government could rely on such report on ease of doing business indicator and take it as a core component of the reform strategies of the government to make policies that were heavily one sided to make common people lose on many fronts. Now in India lot of articles are being writ ten to silence such questionnaires and di lute the damages that had been created out of such reports with illogical arguments and explanations besides silently demanding that World Bank should re start the report to meet the wishes of certain quarters.

But the irony is that there is no demand to make the government to review all its policies that were made based on misleading World Bank’s ease of doing business report and bring in corrections to alter its policies to suit Indian people and Indian economy. That is why it is said that in a capitalistic society when ethics hardly matter, then manipulations and distortions are so common that it will rob the common people to lose due to unfavourable polices from the government.

So, we should understand the politics behind all these developments and enlarge our under standings and perceptions to guide our movement to serve its causes. (IPA Service)