'Ease of Doing Business; Several Milestones Ahead'

Entrepreneurs and specially MSME entrepreneurs contributes a lot in building nation’s GDP. In last couple of years we have witnessed huge focus by various government agencies towards this sector, explains Mr JK Pathak, business and social commentator. Mr Pathak explained the trends in the Ease of Doing  Business.

NEW DELHI: Banking organizations have also been considering the MSME sector as priority sector. All of this is happening to achieve few goals. Ensuring ease of doing business for entrepreneurs is one of the top objective. "But a lot has to be done in this front," says Mr Pathak while highlighting banking sector's contribution towards nurturing the MSME sector.

"There is no doubt that ‘ease of doing business’ in India is an important aspect for the overall betterment of the economy. But this aspect can never be analyzed by any global agency doing a global survey and ranking countries based on their parameters and so on. According to my understanding this must be analyzed by knowing the on ground realities of day to day business. And this knowledge or understanding can only be made by understating specifics of regions, industry sectors and local trends. Further elaborating, an insight of such order can only be achieved by interacting with the entrepreneurs," he stated, "On the other hand, we must acknowledge the fact that the Modi government has taken a number of measures to improve ease of doing business. Though the journey is yet to cover several important milestones, but atleast we must unanimously say that a beginning in the right direction is made."

However, important areas such as labour reforms, taxation, documentation framework for doing business, financial outlook towards entrepreneurs are some of such topics which must be reconsidered by the higher authorities.

As an example, labour reforms itself is a major challenge for most of the manufacturing businesses. "World Bank report clearly points out this challenge. Some other sectors such as agriculture and retail also require attention. Similarly, steps need to be taken to improve efficiency of Indian bureaucracy and judicial system. In addition, I think interests of the MSME sector need to be adequately taken care of as reflected by fall in our position in the report with respect to starting a business," Mr Pathak quoted.

Highlighting those issues which needs to be taken up by the policymakers, Mr Patahk concluded, "Domestic bottlenecks of documentation related issues related industry segments acts as major challenges. A holistic approach is needed by the policymakers to ensure the actual ease of doing business factor among entrepreneurs from the MSME sector. This is not a easy task, this has a lot of complexities but policy makers can resolve the complexities and make things more simpler for the entrepreneur to run the business smoothly."