India may move up 30 positions to rank 100th among 190 countries in the World Bank's Ease of Doing Business Report 2018, a source-based report in The Hindu said. The report is expected to be released on October 31.Affirming that India will take a huge jump in the ease of doing business owing to several reforms made in this area, sources told the paper that “India will hit a century”.The Narendra Modi government, which has vowed to remove red-tape, eliminate procedural delays and turn India into a sought-after investment destination, has set a target of leapfrogging to a rank of 90 in 2017-18 and 30 in the Doing Business survey by 2030.Last year in the areas of ‘starting a business’, ‘dealing with construction permits’, and ‘resolving insolvency' India ranked 155, 185 and 136, respectively, with an overall rank of 130. The rank was up only by one place compared to previous year."The low-rank last year galvanised India to act. There was an explicit order from the PM (Narendra Modi) to ensure faster reforms to improve India’s rankings," sources told the newspaper.Mumbai and Delhi — two cities covered in the report — have shown a good response to the government's call for improvement, sources said adding that “if India maintains this momentum, it can jump to a rank in double digits next year”.In addition, the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP) that is responsible for formulation and implementation of developmental measures for growth of the industrial sector also worked systematically with the line ministries and State governments to “get things done on the ground”, the source said.“That was critical. For a federal democracy with messy coordination, as opposed to China or Russia, this coordination was quite a feat. Comparison with these two will be interesting,” the sources said. Government officials in the DIPP department also expect India's ranking to go up.“We are optimistic (about a huge jump in rankings),” an official told the paper.India's ranking will reflect the impact of the two crucial reforms — demonetisation and Goods and Service Tax — on the firms including samll and medium enterprises.Speculations about a rise in India's rank have been made by other government officials as well. Recently, Commerce and Industry Minister Suresh Prabhu hinted at some “good news” on the ease of doing the business front.The DIPP secretary Ramesh Abhishek had also said that they expect a good performance following the “hard work” done by the government.“We expect India’s ranking to vastly improve, mainly due to reforms in these areas and to a certain extent in other parameters including ‘resolving insolvency’,” a government official told the paper on condition of anonymity.India's score on the World Bank’s ‘distance to frontier’, which represents the best performance observed on each of the indicators across all economies in the Doing Business sample since 2005, has shown a gradual improvement from 48.77 in 2010 to 55.27 in 2017.

Source : Moneycontrol.com