India - falls even more in competitive index of WEF

Bad enough not being in the top 10 or top 25 or even the top 50 countries in the competitiveness index for doing business? Gets worse - India has fallen from the 49th rank to the 51st rank in the index (from 144 countries). Some of the countries which beat us besides China - Saudi Arabia, Brunei, Darussalam, Iceland, Tunisia, Estonia, Thailand, Cyprus, Puerto Rico, Barbados, Indonesia, Slovenia, Lithuania, Montenegro and Malta. This clearly has huge costs in terms of lost opportunity. While it is breezily easy to bring in portfolio foreign capital into India it is brutally hard to actually start business and thus bring foreign direct investment into productive use. We need to move the next level of dismantling the license raj - which is dismantling the inspector raj - particulary in areas such as labour and factory laws which breed corruption and hardly add any value. And while we dismantle the problems of corruption by reducing discretions and permits, we need to move swiftly on getting education and employability right. With just these two things, we can expect to see a substantial improvement of our ranking.