Microsite allows users to track the progress of economic reforms in New Delhi.
AB Wire
Want to know how the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi is faring on the reform front? Is the premier delivering on all those big-ticket reforms that he promised while campaigning in 2014?
A new interactive microsite launched by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC, last week has answers to these questions.
The site, titled “India Economic Reform Scorecard,” allows users to track a list of 29 big reforms the Modi government encountered when it took office in May 2014, and the status of each individual reform.
The Scorecard was unveiled by Richard Rossow, the Wadhwani Chair in US India Policy Studies at CSIS, on November 12. The launch party was attended by dozens of India experts, government officials and journalists.
Rossow said his organization began developing the “Reforms Scorecard” around April 2015.
“We were coming up on the end of the first year of the Modi government, and many experts were reviewing the government’s performance on economic reforms,” he told The American Bazaar. “I found some of the commentary to be relatively shallow, calling for reforms but not spelling out what the author’s ideal “reforms” are. So I thought it would be helpful to try to list out the biggest reforms most frequently noted by economists, trade associations, and even Indian government agencies and political leaders.”
On the microsite, reforms can be tracked by sectors, such as agriculture, communications, defense, energy/mining, fiscal, industry, infrastructure, market access, retail and services. They can also be sorted on the basis of name, status and the degree of difficulty in implementing them.
The reforms are listed under three categories: “incomplete,” “in progress” or “partial success,” and “complete.” For instance, on the government’s efforts to create a unified national tax on goods and services, the progress is listed as “incomplete” and difficulty listed as “high.” The status: “The Lok Sabha passed the GST Bill (122nd Constitutional Amendment) on 5/6/15, but the legislation is stalled in the Rajya Sabha.”
So what marks the Scorecard gives the government at the moment?
Of the 29 reforms, as of November 17, 2015, 12 are listed as incomplete and 12 in progress. The completed ones are: deregulation of diesel pricing, allowing more than 50% foreign investment in Railways, allowing foreign investment in more construction projects, fully opening the coal mining sector to private/foreign investment, extending the expiration dates of industrial licenses and conducting transparent auctions of telecom spectrum.
Rossow said the Scorecard will be updated monthly as one sees “tangible progress” on reforms. He added: “[We] hope to get a sense of the trajectory of reform: will it slow down, speed up, or remain constant during the NDA government’s 5 year term? These are interesting questions that will help those of us who follow India’s political-economic developments going forward.”