While presenting the Economic Survey 2019-20, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman informed that India has jumped up 79 positions in the World Bank’s Doing Business rankings, improving from 142 in 2014 to 63 in 2019. It has progressed on seven out of the 10 parameters. The GST and IBC top the list of reforms that have propelled India’s rise in the rankings. However, the country continues to trail in parameters such as Ease of Starting Business (rank 136), Registering Property (154), Paying Taxes (115), and Enforcing Contracts (163), according to a PIB release.The number of procedures required to set up a business in India, for example, has reduced from 13 to 10 over the past 10 years. However, a lot more needs to be done.Construction permits: India has considerably improved this process over the past five years. Compared to 2014, when it took about 186 days and 28.2 per cent of the warehouse cost, in 2019 it takes 98-113.5 days and 2.8-5.4 per cent of the warehouse cost.Trading across borders: Increasing digitalisation and seamlessly integrating multiple agencies onto a single digital platform can further reduce procedural inefficiencies significantly and improve user experience substantially.The turnaround time of ships in India has been on a continuous decline, almost halving from 4.67 days in 2010-11 to 2.48 days in 2018-19. This shows that achieving significant efficiency gains in the case of sea ports is possible. The simplification of the Ease of Doing Business landscape of individual sectors such as tourism or manufacturing, however, requires a more targeted approach that maps out the regulatory and process bottlenecks for each segment. Setting up and operating services or manufacturing businesses in India face a maze of laws, rules and regulations. This must be cleaned up and rationalised, one segment at a time. Enforcing a contract in India takes on average 1,445 days compared to just 216 days in New Zealand and 496 days in China. Paying taxes takes up over 250 hours compared to 140 hours in New Zealand, 138 in China and 191 in Indonesia. These provide a measure of the scope for improvement.