After breaking into top 100 in the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business Index under the Modi government last October, India has achieved yet another landmark success. Over the last four years, India has jumped 22 ranks on United Nation’s E-Government Index and 11 ranks in the last two years. As a result India has broken into top 100 in the index and is now holding the 96th rank. This is a massive improvement as against the 118th rank that India was holding in 2014.
The index is released once in every two years.
“The E-Government Development Index (EGDI), which assesses e-government development at the national level, is a composite index based on the weighted average of three normalized indices. One-third is derived from a Telecommunications Infrastructure Index (TII) based on data provided by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), one-third from a Human Capital Index (HCI) based on data provided by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and one-third from the Online Service Index (OSI) based on data collected from an independent survey questionnaire, conducted by UNDESA, which assesses the national online presence of all 193 United Nations Member States”. The report explains the methodology of arriving at the index.
As far as E-Participation sub-index is concerned India is among the top 15 countries out of 193 countries which were surveyed. India scored 100 per cent in the first stage of E-Participation sub-index, 95.65 per cent in the second stage and 90.91 per cent in the third stage. The overall score for India is 0.9551 on the E-Participation sub-index. With such an impressive score, India has become a regional leader far ahead of all its neighbours. Denmark is the world leader, both on E-Government index and E-Participation sub-index.
However, there are certain areas which call for improvement if India has to move higher up in the index. India ranks miserably on the Telecommunication Infrastructure Index with a meager score of 0.20091. Similarly, India fares only slightly better on the Human Capital Index with a score of just 0.5484. This is way below the global average of 0.6627. In fact, this score barely touches the regional index. If India can work on these areas in the coming years, then it is almost certain that India will continue its upward growth as far as the overall index is concerned.
As far as the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business Index is concerned this is indeed a huge success for the Modi government. From a massive improvement of 22 ranks, it is clear that Modi government has taken the nation into just another league after taking on from a poor legacy left behind by the UPA government. It goes on to show that under prime minister Modi’s leadership, the government has worked hard and brought about positive results in every sector of governance. This is now getting reflected in such indices. India’s leapfrog jump on the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business helped India in gaining greater economic significance on the global stage. This marks the emergence of India as an ever evolving and improving economy under the Modi government.
