World Bank is again telling us how to do business - this time under the leadership of its outgoing chief economist, Kaushik Basu. His ascension has led to additions on building regulations, getting a power connection, transfer of property, etc. India continues to be an unattractive place for business; if we take the scores seriously, India is twice as good as Eritrea, which is the worst in the list of 189 countries, and two-thirds as good as the best - Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea or Scandinavia. But it also makes good news for once: it has amended the company law to make things easier for start-ups, and Delhi and Bombay electricity distributors have made it easier to get a connection. In other ways too, the report is tilted in India's favour. For instance, it only looks at laws, not at how they are implemented, it relies on experts and not on real businessmen, it does not cover small businesses and foreign companies, and it covers only a couple of big cities.
The terrible condition of power supply in India shows up in this report also. Power outages came to 23 days a year in South Asia. The only worse region was Sub-Saharan Africa, with outages close to 29 days. But South Asia outdid the rest of the world in the number of power outages, in excess of 200 here. The cut-off for the data was the middle of 2015; it is possible that conditions have improved since then. Still, India is one of the world's least developed countries when it comes to power supply. It does not have to be so; power problems are not difficult to fix. All they require is that the Centre should own or lease sufficient generation capacity to balance state shortages and a robust interstate transmission system, and should feed in power to prevent any shortage - and as the report suggests, the Central Electricity Authority should monitor outages. And it should enforce uniform electricity prices: the report shows that it is precisely in countries like India that sell electricity cheap to the poor that the supply to the poor is least reliable.
The Central government has already found a way of making states pay for the power by deducting the cost from the funds it transfers to the states. Every step necessary to solve the problem has been taken; it is to be hoped that for once, the government will solve the problem itself, to the relief of all power consumers. If it does so, businesses, too, will shut down their expensive little generators and start relying on the state power system. Apart from improving how India looks in the World Bank report, it will improve India's international competitiveness - especially in textiles, which are causing Smriti Irani sleepless nights. It would be a good idea for her to start badgering Piyush Goyal, the minister of power.
Another area in which India lags behind the entire world is digitisation of land records. The details in land registries are slowly being digitised in some states. But there is another set of data that can be digitised, namely use of land area. Its digitisation can be used to check encumbrances on public and private land. The government is so paranoid about our borders with China and Pakistan that it has stopped Google's programme of universal mapping from being extended to India. This is foolish. It should distinguish between area that is occupied by us and area claimed by us, but not occupied, and build up digital records for both, with the help of the most qualified mapper, wherever he is in the world. It is not only in doing business that India can improve its performance; if it looks around, it can better itself in every direction.
The writer is a senior economist and was chief consultant in the Finance Ministry from 1991 to 1993