On Wednesday, the governing alliance's Commerce Minister Anand Sharma publicly distanced his ministry from the findings of a study on the ease of doing business among states commissioned by its own Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion. This was no surprise because the study, conducted by global consultancy Accenture, threw up an embarrassing and inconvenient truth that Narendra Modi-ruled Gujarat topped in terms of best practices in land acquisition laws and environmental clearances. Both were issues that involved considerable controversy during the current regime's decade in power. At the press conference he called to repudiate the study, Sharma was heard grumbling in an aside to his officials that he had been at an old friend's place in Himachal, where he had gone to vote, when he heard about the report and was forced to rush back to Delhi. An index, perhaps, of the ennui of a government in exit mode?
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