Doing Business in India ..... How reliable?

IFC recently published its annual Doing Business report. A summary of India's comparison with other countries on different parameters is given here and in the chart below -

Newspapers are running reports on some of the findings of the report. We can see the headlines like "India dropped 6 places to 122 among 181 countries", "Ludhiana is the easiest city to do business in India" OR " Patna is the least expensive city to start a business".

However what is missing from the reported news is the analysis behind the numbers. I tried going through some of the numbers from the report and here are some of the findings -

• India slipped 5 places to 136 in dealing with construction permits - What I fail to understand is the duration (days) mentioned in the report. It is constant at 224 days since 2007? Number of procedures may remain same at 20 however number of days is baffling. On the same hand, property registration takes 45 days now instead of 62 in 2008
• Employing workers - Rank remains same at 89 however firing cost is constant since 2007 at 56 weeks of salary. How did they get this high number is beyond my understanding when it is recently reported that lakhs of people in India have lost jobs in recent months
• Paying taxes - India's rank is 169 now, it was 167 in 2008. Most notable feature is that the time to pay taxes has increased from 264 hours in 2007 to 271 hours in 2009. Does that mean that all the stories around online system are made up OR that the online systems have deteriorated the system
• Enforcing contracts - All the data including rank (180), procedures (46), duration (1420) and even the cost as % of claims (39.6%) remains same since 2007. What does this signify? I leave it to your judgment
• Closing a business - Rank (140), Time in years (10 ?), Cost as % of estate (9%) remains same since 2007. However recovery rate has reduced from 13% in 2007 to 10.4% in 2009

I understand that doing such analysis and collecting all the data is tedious. I appreciate that they have listed all the procedures and timeline etc for all the indicators; however some of the reported data seems incorrect. I would like to understand if I am missing something.