A few things that stand out (not that it's that shocking!)
- Narratives matter -- a lot . Second order effects of such subjective rankings are real . Imagine getting a credit downgrade because someone perceives the democracy to be under threat
- "the government had reverse-engineered the ranking, strategically identifying procedural tweaks that directly boosted India’s scores in Delhi and Mumbai—the two cities evaluated by the World Bank" .
I love the whole cynical nature of this. This is statecraft at it's finest ( I render no moral judgements here :) ). This is reminiscent of Machiavelli or Kautilya (Chanakya) [0]
A lot more to digest but will post them as a reply on this thread.