Times of Better Bharat

The strategy worked

India's climb from 142nd to 63rd on Ease of Doing Business between 2015 and 2020 was not an accident. DPIIT ran it as a programme, with named officials accountable for named sub-indicators. The same machinery drove the Global Innovation Index climb from 81st to 38th.

Treating a ranking as a management objective is unusual and, on its own terms, it delivered. Anyone dismissing it as mere image management is not looking at what changed underneath — insolvency law, construction permits, electricity connections.

The distortion is structural, not moral

Every index is a sample. Doing Business measured regulatory steps in Delhi and Mumbai. Optimising against it therefore optimised Delhi and Mumbai, and optimised the steps that were counted rather than the friction that was felt.

This is Goodhart's law operating exactly as specified, and it requires no bad faith. A ministry told to improve a number will improve that number, and the gap between the number and the underlying thing is a property of the index, not a failure of the ministry.

The Doing Business episode then delivered the sharper lesson. The World Bank withdrew the report in 2021 after an audit found its leadership had pressured staff to alter the 2018 and 2020 editions — the two carrying India's largest gains. India's reforms in that period were substantially real. But the scoreboard that motivated them turned out to be corruptible, and a country that had organised its reform programme around that scoreboard had no independent way to know how much of the movement was its own.

What follows

The defensible conclusion is not 'ignore rankings'. It is that the index should be treated as an indicator of the thing, never as the thing, and that a government serious about the underlying variable should invest in measuring it domestically — where it controls the methodology and cannot be surprised by a retraction.

There is a second, quieter implication. A country that publishes its own honest measurements, including unflattering ones, buys something a ranking cannot give it: the ability to tell whether it is actually improving when the external scoreboard disappears. India has the statistical capacity to do this. Whether it chooses to is a political question rather than a technical one.

How to read this

This is an argument, not a measurement. The charts above are sourced and checkable; the reasoning between them is editorial judgement and should be treated as such. Where a claim has no series behind it, it is stated as judgement rather than fact.