vCHENNAI: Tamil Nadu has been ranked among the top seven achievers based on the implementation of the business reform action plan (BRAP), 2020, according to a report released by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Thursday.
While the Commerce and Industry ministry changed the system of ranking by making it category-based—top achievers, achievers, aspires, and emerging business ecosystems—against the earlier practice of announcing ranks, the ranking has been done using a point system. Going by the point system, TN's rank jumped to three from the earlier ranking of 14. Andhra was ranked top with 98%, followed by Gujarat at 97.7% and Tamil Nadu at 97%.
Pooja Kulkarni, MD and CEO of TN's investment promotion agency, Guidance, says the ranking is an effort put in by multiple departments and coordinated and facilitated by the Guidance and Industries department. Credit should also go to regular reviews by Chief Secretary Irai Anbu and Industries Secretary S Krishnan in ensuring the reforms are implemented.
The efforts have resulted in the State wooing `70,000 crore of investments in the last year (July, 2021 to June 30, 2022) and more are likely to be announced next week.
The credit should also go to the single window portal, says Pooja Kulkarni. The biggest challenge before the State was the single window portal as well as services provided by departments, which were yet to be made online. These include registration under legal metrology, weights and measures and change of land use. Similarly, end-to-end online services were not available for many services. But this changed over time. From mere 40 services spread across 14 departments, the portal now caters to 140 Government to Business (G2B) services. "We plan to provide 200 G2B services within the next six to eight months," she says.
The BRAP includes 301 reform points covering 15 business regulatory areas such as Access to Information, Single Window System, Labour, Environment, Land Administration & Transfer of Land and Property, Utility Permits and others. one hundred and eighteen new reforms were included to further augment the reform process. Sectoral reforms with 72 action points spread across nine sectors, namely Trade License, Healthcare, Legal Metrology, Cinema Halls, Hospitality, Fire NOC, Telecom, Movie Shooting and Tourism, were introduced to expand the scope of the reform agenda.
Kulkarni added that mere rolling out services is not enough. Guidance has been monitoring the success rate of the reforms. "We handhold the investors and even help them if there are some lacunas in the application by sitting with them and suggesting how they can go about it," she says, adding that this has resulted in investors' faith in the investment climate of Tamil Nadu. Now the State is vying to be number one in ease of doing business although the Centre has done away with such rankings.