CHENNAI: The State government is taking extra efforts to improve its ranking in the Ease of Doing Business Index. The officials are racing against time to complete 30 of the 47 reforms unimplemented by the June 3 deadline. One of the biggest challenges among these is going paperless by introducing end-to-end online services. This is crucial because the rankings this year will focus on the feedback received to the 80-point reforms agenda.
Last year, Tamil Nadu was ranked 15 with an ease of doing business score of 90.68. The evaluation was conducted based on the implementation of 372 reforms suggested under the Business Reform Action Plan (BRAP) of 2017-18. This year, the BRAP 2019 has listed 80 reform points.
Of the 372 reforms suggested under the BRAP of 2017-18, only 369 were applicable to State, claim officials. “Of these, 291 were evidence-based and the rest both evidence-based and feedback-based. The State fared poorly in feedback based reforms, scoring less than 50 per cent, as stakeholders were not aware of the reforms undertaken,” said an official.
Apart from online services, other challenges that the State will have to meet include, single-window portal, registration under legal metrology and change of land use. The government is working on providing construction permits online, for it has a weighting of 22 marks in the ranking. It is learnt that the Industries Department is also mulling amendment of rules to make services fully online based.