The World Bank’s Business Ready assessment, B-Ready, will publish its findings on 101-plus economies this September. For the first time since its predecessor, the Ease of Doing Business (EoDB) ranking, was shelved, India’s business environment will be measured against the rest of the world by an entity other than itself.
The World Bank discontinued its Doing Business survey in 2021 after an independent investigation found that senior bank officials had pressured staff to alter data in the 2018 and 2020 editions, most visibly to lift China’s ranking. Azerbaijan, Saudi Arabia and the UAE saw their scores adjusted too.
The rebuilt B-Ready, launched in 2024, is a methodology that leans less on expert opinion of what national laws say and more on what thousands of firms report actually happens to them.
For India, this history matters. It means the exercise the country now faces has been redesigned specifically to close the loophole that discredited its predecessor, which makes a strong Indian showing worth more than a Doing Business ranking once was.
India boasts of strong macroeconomic numbers in 2026, with a 7.7% GDP growth rate last fiscal year (the fastest pace among the world’s major economies), nominal GDP of $4 trillion, inflation held within its target range, an import cover close to 11 months and a modest 1.1% current account deficit.
Behind these numbers lies a decade of reform efforts by the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT), comprising seven editions of the Business Reforms Action Plan, over 9,700 state-level reforms, more than 47,000 compliances reduced and a national single window system linking approvals across three dozen states and central ministries.
The change has been dramatic at the entry stage: a company can now be registered, tax-enrolled and bank-ready within a week through a single digital filing. Startup India has recognized over 185,000 new enterprises, most within days of their applying.
However, there is need for caution. The old Doing Business framework scored regulation largely as it was written, judged mostly by expert opinion on how good our laws looked on paper. B-Ready asks: does the written code match the practice? It pairs expert assessment with direct firm surveys, asking not just whether a rule exists, but whether business owners across tier-2 /3 cities experience it the way it was intended.
That is a higher bar, and even economies with strong reform reputations elsewhere have found it exposes gaps their own reporting had missed.
B-Ready also follows a firm through its entire life, covering location, labour, finance, trade, taxes and what happens when things go wrong. This is where India’s record thins out. Our courts have 50 million pending cases, a backlog that has grown roughly 80% in a decade; land and property disputes account for a striking share of it.
Close to two-thirds of all civil litigation can be traced to who owns what piece of land. Parliament passed the Commercial Courts Act in 2015 precisely to speed up business disputes, aiming for court judgements within a year, but the implementation of its procedures has been uneven across states.
Inaction is not necessarily to blame. Land-record digitization, a key enabler, has made real if patchy progress and dedicated commercial courts work well in a number of places. That unevenness, however, is what a firm-level survey is designed to catch.
These gaps cannot all be read as a failure of will. Land is a state subject under India’s Constitution and the judiciary is rightly independent of the executive. No central ministry, however well-run, can legislate its way into the timeline of another branch of government or into the differing capacities of 28 states.
The DPIIT’s reform tools, from compliance reduction to digital platforms, are real instruments, but they were never designed to compel a court’s pace or a state land administration’s efficiency. Judged against what the DPIIT actually controls, its record looks impressive.
Lacunae at the ground level does not mean India should expect a poor showing on B-Ready overall, nor that the assessment will simply validate every doubt.
The country is likely to score high on ‘business entry,’ where digital systems genuinely deliver what they promise, and equally likely to fare poorly on ‘dispute resolution,’ where the gap between statute and courtroom reality has been documented by independent legal researchers for years, long before this exercise came along.
A mixed, pillar-by-pillar result would not be an indictment of India’s reform thrust. It would accurately reflect an economy where some parts of government can move quickly and others, by design, cannot.
Whatever September’s numbers show, India’s demographic clock provides a significant reason for policymakers to keep pushing regardless of the score.
India’s working-age population is projected to peak around 2041. We have perhaps 15 years in which our growth and workforce advantage will move in the same direction before the arithmetic turns against the economy. What matters is whether millions of workers who are still in low-productivity agriculture can actually move into better jobs. This is a shift that depends as much on functioning courts and clear land titles as on how quickly a business startup can be registered.
The World Bank’s B-Ready should be taken as less a verdict than a mirror, a genuinely useful one, after six years without such a report card. What we do with what this survey shows will matter more than the rank itself.
These are the author’s personal views.
The author is professor, economics, and executive director, Centre for Family Business & Entrepreneurship at Bhavan’s SPJIMR.