Just how hard is it to start a business in India

The entire piece is pretty scary. From the WSJ:

It's tough to be an entrepreneur anywhere, but India presents special obstacles—byzantine bureaucracy, moldering roads and power grids, cultural pressures that penalize risk-taking, and corruption. Mr. Alva says the thugs demanded bribes to go away. He wouldn't pay.

Entrepreneurship is vital to India as the nation of 1.2 billion tries to reduce poverty through economic growth. Small and medium businesses are the largest nonfarm employers and account for 45% of manufacturing output, according to government data and a study last month by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the Confederation of Indian Industry. Those small firms are adding some 3.3 million jobs per year—not nearly enough to accommodate the roughly 13 million people entering India's job market.

India ranks among the world's worst countries at encouraging entrepreneurs. For ease of starting a business, India is 166th out of 183 countries, just ahead of Angola, according to World Bank figures released recently. Only one country, Timor-Leste, is worse at enforcing contracts. . . .