The spate of survey reports brought out by well-reputed and not-so-well-reputed agencies, both at the national and international levels, have played a stellar role in increasing awareness of best practices across sectors and economies. Their rankings have done a swell job of inducing a sense of competition and setting new benchmarks for laggard regions and nations to follow. But when such surveys begin to assume an air of authority unjustified by their compilation methodologies, they begin to look more and more like what they are: just a pack of numbers. In recent years, several survey results have been talking points mostly for bearing no relation to actual ground realities.
Consider, for instance, the World Bank?s recent Doing Business 2008 report, which ranks India 120th among 177 nations, even as the actual cash seems to follow an entirely different set of considerations, informed perhaps by private assessments, if not other reports that put India next only to China as an attractive destination for foreign direct investment (FDI). Coming in at a lowly No 120 doesn?t seem to hurt, suggesting that the World Bank?s report is not taken very seriously by business decision makers. Take a closer look at the parameter by parameter rankings, and the reasons become apparent. India?s performance on ease of trading across borders has improved dramatically, taking it up by 63 ranks in just over one year. Unless dozens of other countries have suddenly constricted their borders and tumbled off the chart, there?s no explanation for India?s good showing here. The cited introduction of online cargo clearance procedures is hardly momentous. India has also made gains on the ease of getting credit, going up 26 places. There has not been any significant positive policy change to justify such an improvement in ranking, and the setting up of credit bureaus hardly makes a difference. Are international surveys much too rigidly formatted on global templates to catch the real nature of changes? It would seem so. This is distressing because India does need good scales to judge its progress on human development, transparency and other criteria for which there are no actual cash flows to validate or invalidate the findings of such surveys. The social sector cannot get far without good data, and any fall in the credibility of existing yardsticks is therefore worrisome.
