The ease of doing business index is a sign of how obsessed we all are with the idea of making money. It isn’t something the world even pretended to need before 2002, when a paper titled ‘The Regulation of Entry’ was published by a group of economists in America. Since then, however, it routinely attracts a lot more attention than less important reports on hunger or poverty, so I spent a bit of time looking at how India has been faring on this front.

Apparently, we have improved our ranking by 79 positions over the past five years. I asked a few friends who happen to be businessmen about what this meant, and if these figures really reflected how they go about their daily lives. There was much shrugging of shoulders, which I expected because ground realities are almost always radically different from what any economist sitting in the West can say about another country. A few consultancy firms laughed off these rankings too, pointing out that companies in India continued to face all kinds of obstacles, be it with the nightmarish processes involved in obtaining a permit or inordinate delays in payments for public procurement.