Centre develops rating system for ministries to promote ease of doing business

The Centre will soon issue guidelines to rate ministries on facilitating ease of doing business, in extensive consultation with industry leaders, startups and trade bodies.

Some of the parameters to judge which ministry is doing better to attract industries are early clearance to projects, single-window approvals, use of Digital India mission, etc.

To get better rankings, the ministries will be required to declare the number of physical files generated and cleared in a given time slot, complaints raised and industry reach out programmes organised. The Centre will ask the ministries to submit details on the number of single-window projects cleared, time taken to clear proposals for setting up new units, the number of permits needed to start a new industry and use of budgetary allocations.

The Union government wants to minimise generation of physical files to reduce corruption and encourage ministries to adopt digitalisation in every day work.

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Additionally, the Centre will rank ministries depending on use of renewable energy sources on their facilities, ease of access to department websites, etc.

All these parameters will be applicable to central ministries as well as public sector enterprises.

The Centre already has a set of guidelines to judge states based on some 180 reform initiatives across 45 business regulatory areas.

A few days back, the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) declared its intent to rank states, specifically state environment impact assessment authorities (SEIAAs), on the basis of speed with which they give environmental clearances (EC) to development projects.  The move drew criticism from policy experts and environmental activists who said this could result in more projects being cleared without proper due diligence.