The individual’s ease of living is the level of wealth, comfort, material goods and necessities available to them in a certain geographic area. It includes factors like income, quality and availability of employment, class disparity, poverty rate, quality and affordability of housing, education, growth, environmental quality. The ease of living is closely related to the quality of life.

Body:

Need to target ease of living:

• In the recently released Global Hunger Index (GHI), India featured at the 100th position among 119 countries, lagging behind even North Korea and Iraq.
• About 40 per cent of city’s population is compelled to live in slums, and municipal authorities have failed consistently to come up with affordable housing schemes for people with low income.
• A census report states that 64 million people live in India’s slums. The problem becomes more severe with urban India, where 17 per cent people live in slums. Over 70 per cent of slum households get their water from a tap, but just half of them get water in their homes.
• With burgeoning urban population, existing urban infrastructure, both institutional and physical, is being tested.
• From demands of reservations for locals in educational institutes and hospitals, to permanent damage to eco-systems, drainage networks and water-tables, side effects of poorly thought out and badly regulated urbanisation are beginning to show

How ease of doing business leads to ease of living:

• The reforms undertaken to ease of doing business helps in removing excess influence of the governments from people’s lives.
• The people would have the freedom of pursuing their aspirations.
• It reduces the policy paralysis and strengthens the confidence of business environment.
• With better policies in lieu of attracting business, it helps in more job creations reducing the unemployment rate and in turn increases the per capita income.
• With ease of doing business, many job seekers would turn into job-givers, thereby spurring the economy by investment.
• The infrastructure- physical and socio-economic will be rejuvenated to ensure faster connectivity which enhances business and in turn the lives of people in rural areas.
• The ease of doing business would help attract foreign investments into India, providing the necessary capital to start new ventures.
• It could help foray into new avenues from food processing to fibre optics thereby diversifying the business chains horizontally.
• With introduction of the state of the art science and technology features, it can lead to spin-off effects helping the socio-economic development of society.

Way forward:

• Efficiency, Productivity, quality, speedy implementation and execution of upgraded scheme with help achieve the targets.
• Economic growth and job creation addresses Ease of Living to an extent.
• Role of society in it is imperative.
• Need to adopt holistic approach like industries can be created with manpower intensive since growth does not always translate into jobs.
• Decentralised and universal coverage of health and education to the lowest rung of the society should be ensured.

Conclusion:

It is more important of looking at people at large. People at ground level should feel happiness, change, providing them opportunity to lead life with dignity. If people’s life is comfortable and if they are happy automatically the productivity increases because “Happy society is a flourishing society”.