New Delhi: A day after the World Bank’s report showing India’s ranking in the “Ease of Doing Business” Index having risen 30 places, the BJP and the Congress were engaged in a war of words.
While Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi used a couplet to take a dig at the government suggesting that reality contradicts the report’s findings, Union finance minister Arun Jaitley hit back, saying that the UPA’s “ease of doing corruption” has been replaced by the NDA’s “ease of doing business”.
Joining his Cabinet colleague to take on Mr Gandhi, law minister Ravi Shankar Prasad asked how much the Congress leader knows about the economy, and added that the more Mr Gandhi speaks, the more he exposes himself.
Mr Gandhi tweeted in Urdu, taking off from a famous Ghalib verse, to say the finance minister was deluding himself. Soon after the report was released on Tuesday, Mr Jaitley had said India was the only major country that was named for pursuing structural reforms.
According to the World Bank report released Tuesday, India’s rank in the “Ease of Doing Business” index has risen from 130 to 100 this year, helped by a slew of reforms.
At a campaign rally in Gujarat on Wednesday, Mr Gandhi said Mr Jaitley should ask small and mid-sized businessmen if the ease of doing business had really improved or not. “The entire country will shout and say ease of doing business is absent, you have destroyed it, your demonetisation and GST have ruined it,” said Mr Rahul.
