The decline is visible in the details, big and small. Passenger car sales, which had been falling for a while, dropped by more than 23 percent in the period between April and September, compared with the same period in 2018, according to the Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers. Export growth has been lethargic for a while. Standard & Poor’s recently warned of rising risks in India’s financial sector. The unemployment rate is at a 45-year high.

It’s not just that economic growth is slowing down overall; inequality is rising as well. According to Oxfam, 73 percent of the wealth generated in India in 2017 went to the richest 1 percent. Inequality was worsening before the present administration took office, but with growth slowing down and unemployment rising, the effects are more painful.

So how can it be getting easier to do business in India, apparently, even as by some measures, economic growth is decelerating? These simultaneous developments, far from being conflicting, actually explain each other.

The World Bank’s ease-of-doing-business rankings are primarily an assessment of how good a country’s laws look on paper rather than how they operate in practice. By the report’s own account, “approximately two-thirds of the data embedded in the Doing Business indicators are based on a reading of the law.” In other words, a government can adjust its regulations in a way that ensures it will make progress along the index, even if the changes have minimal effect on the ground.

Real growth, on the other hand, depends on how well the laws are actually carried out.

These days in India, divisiveness is increasing throughout society while trust in the government is declining, at least among major economic actors. Consider this indirect indicator of waning confidence, which is often overlooked: what economists call “investment,” the part of national output that leaves out consumables like food, clothing and housing and refers to production that will enhance future productivity, such as the building of machines, factories and infrastructure.