Just cracking the exam isn’t enough
Litmus test How easy MSMEs will find doing business will be crucial - Bijoy Ghosh×
How meaningful is India’s meteoric rise through the ease of doing business rankings?
If the Indian government was a student giving the Class 12 exams, it would be one of the increasing number of ‘toppers’ who are managing to score a perfect 100 per cent in all subjects at least as far as the ease of doing business rankings is concerned.
In the much touted and followed rankings brought out by the World Bank, India has, after Prime Minister Narendra Modi made going up the rankings a key focus area for his government, been simply rocketing up the rankings.
At a time the World Trade Organisation (WTO) is preparing to hunker down to debate a contentious proposal to grant a waiver on intellectual property rights (IPR) on Covid-19 vaccines, the Bombay Chamber of Commerce & Industry (BCCI) has injected an element of controversy at home by suggesting that the Modi government ought to explore the possibility of permitting the issue of compulsory licences so that other vaccine providers can produce Covaxin under the Indian Patent Act in order to boost its production.
There have been reports of a severe shortage of Covaxin and the chamber’s proposal which mirrors the position that India is going to adopt before the WTO could open up a heated debate here as well.
Noida: Harper Collins, 2018; pp 358 + xxv, `
799.
A series of reports released in 2018 by Oxfam and World Inequality Lab pointed to monstrous inequalities across the world, but the data pertaining to India was far more intimidating. The Oxfam survey reveals that India’s richest 1% corner 73% of the national wealth (
Economic Times 2018). This picture gets murkier when we witness the increase in the number of billionaires in India from one in 1991 to 131 in 2018 (
Financial Express 2018). In fact, in 2018 alone, the wealth of billionaires in India grew by `2,200 crore, while the poorest remained in debt (Oxfam India 2019). In 2008, in a speech to the Bombay Chamber of Commerce, Raghuram Rajan (2008) evinced a threat of oligarchy in India, which did not trigger a debate at that point of time; however, in 2011, Jayant Sinha and Ashutosh Varshney wrote somewhat strongly that it is now “the time for India to rein in its robber barons” (Sinha and Varshney 2011). In a