Andhra Pradesh, Telangana easiest States to do business
the goan I network
PANAJI
While Goa’s rank was 21, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana have emerged as the easiest states to do business. Goa’s score was just 18.15%, which means that the state implemented just 18.15% of reforms suggested by the central government to make doing business easier.
The gap between Goa and top performing states is staggering. Andhra-Pradesh and Telangana scored 98.78%, which means they have implemented most of the reforms to make business easier.
Goa’s performance was particularly poor on ‘availability of land’ and ‘single window’ criteria. Earlier also, industries have complained that there is hardly any land left in the industrial estates of the State. Moreover, 35.56 lakh square meters of land is stuck in Goa due to special economic zone (SEZ) related litigation.
It is indeed tough to find land for a big project in Goa and this factor seems to have taken a major toll on Goa’s ranking.
Although, the State has instituted reforms like creation of ‘investment promotion board’ (IPB) in 2014, but industries still have to go to different departments to get approvals, which ends up taking a lot of time.
Due to this, the state’s performance on the parameter of ‘single window’ is also poor. It is on parameters like ‘single window’ and ‘availability of land’ that states like Andhra-Pradesh, Telangana and Gujarat performed well.
Goa’s performance is worse than other states even on ‘construction permit enablers’, which involves creating conflict resolution mechanism for land and construction permits and developing land use plans for urban areas.
A number of states in India like Gujarat, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Haryana, Jharkhand, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand, Maharashtra, Odisha and Punjab have scored more than 90% in this study.
These rankings were devised by the central government, while launching ‘Make-in-India’ campaign in 2014, it realized that complexity of regulatory processes and difficulty in compliance were major impediments in industrial developments in the country.
An action plan to rectify the situation was circulated and an assessment was carried out to know to what extent states had implemented reforms between January 2015 and June 2015. Goa’s rank was 19, then.
When the same exercise was done again to assess till June 2016, Goa’s rank has slipped to 21.
