Andhra Pradesh, led by YSR Congress party president and chief minister Y S Jagan Mohan Reddy, has bagged the No. 1 rank in the East of Doing Business under the Business Reforms Action Plan 2020 of the Union government.
The rankings which are generally announced every year, could not be awarded for the last two years due to Covid-19 pandemic. The announcement for 2020 was made on Thursday.
Out of the top seven achiever states in the country, Andhra Pradesh stood at the top, followed by Gujarat, Haryana, Karnataka, Punjab, Telangana and Tamil Nadu. So, Telangana state, which had been competing with Andhra every year, plunged to sixth position.
In all, the Centre has divided the states into four categories and presented the awards with regard to performing in business. Andhra Pradesh secured 97.89 percent, followed by Gujarat with 97.77.
Telangana could get 94.86 percent, while Tamil Nadu secured 96.97 percent marks in various sectors.
For the first time, the Centre adopted different methods to award ranking to the states. It collected opinions from 10,200 investors and stakeholders and consolidated them to present ranks. The participants expressed a lot of satisfaction over the decisions taken by the Jagan government.
A central government release said the BRAP 2020 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.
As many as 118 new reforms were included to further augment the reform process. Sectoral reforms with 72 action points spread across 9 sectors namely Trade License, Healthcare, Legal Metrology, Cinema Halls, Hospitality, Fire NOC, Telecom, Movie Shooting and Tourism were introduced for the first time to expand the scope of reform agenda.
The broader aim is to boost investor confidence, foster business friendly climate and augment Ease of Doing Business across the country by introducing an element of healthy competition through a system of assessing states based on their performance in the implementation of Business Reforms Action Plan.
In a departure from the previous years, where States/UTs were ranked, this year they have been placed under the four categories viz. Top Achievers, Achievers, Aspirers and Emerging Business Ecosystems.
The objective of assessing the States/UTs is not to create a hierarchy amongst States/UTs but to rather create an enabling framework wherein learnings can be shared amongst States/UTs which in turn will lead to a nationwide spill over of good practices.
The assessment gives full weightage to the feedback obtained from actual users/respondents at the ground level, who provided their feedback about the effective implementation of reforms.