Hardly two months have passed and few days are remaining for the coming ease of doing business rankings. In this phase, states such as West Bengal, Chattisgarh, and Madhya Pradesh are already in the top position. The program’s nodal agency Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP) will provide absolute ranking in May based on the user feedback.

In order to verify the economic reforms implemented in the States, the World Bank team is conducting a one-on-one interview with around 8000 random users. This is happening for the first time that the government is collecting feedback on states’ reforms before releasing the final ranking. DIPP has also created a pair of high and low-performance states of last year so that they can learn some lessons from each other. In the last year’s ranking, the top Telangana pair has been formed with Tripura. Apart from this, Andhra Pradesh has been linked to Kerala, West Bengal, Nagaland and Odisha to Manipur.

Andhra Pradesh and Telangana were jointly ranked first in last year’s rankings due to the reforms in the ease of Doing Business in 2016. Gujarat was number one before that; it had topped the rankings in 2015.

Last month, Bengal Chief Minister Mamta Banerjee tweeted that due to regular and intensive monitoring from the ground level to the state secretariat level, it has been ensured that the projects are implemented properly without any problem. She also tweeted that Bengal has become number one in the country, leaving the perceived industry-friendly states in the economy of doing business. The State Reforms Action Plan was created for 372 Reforms points involving the implementation, which is to create a single window agency for all approvals, to implement the Public Delivery Guarantee Act and to ensure joint inspections under 10 Labor Acts.