NEW DELHI: India will continue with reforms and there will be greater liberalisation of the economy, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman said on Friday and urged global investors to take advantage of the opportunities that the country offers.
“I don’t think anything is holding back the Indian economy. We are trying to grow at the fastest possible rate. I would counter pose a question: what is holding the investors back? I want to ask where are the investible funds ? What are they looking at ? What is holding them back?,” the FM said during an interaction at the Washington based think tank CSIS.
Stating that India has received “quite an appreciable number of FDIs,” Sitharaman said global investors should look more at the opportunities given the conversations around China plus one strategy and the advantages that India offers in terms of the demographic dividend, skilled young workforce and high growth.
The FM, who is in Washington for the annual IMF-World Bank meetings, also detailed the string of reform measures that have been undertaken by government.
She said under the Jal Jeevan mission each and every house gets water connections and electricity is being supplied to villages.
“I don’t think any village is unelectrified today. Whereas in 2014, there were villages, some even situated close to their respective state capitals, without electricity, But the situation has changed and households are getting electricity,” the FM said and also referred to the efforts made by government to ensure food security of the citizens after the Covid-19 pandemic.
Sitharaman said the country’s economy was growing at a fast rate on the back of domestic demand and the conversations during the Fund-Bank meetings pointed to better days for the global economy although challenges persisted.
“The largest sense which prevailed in the two day discussions of the International Monetary Fund and also of the World Bank, is that there will be a soft landing. The efforts by the Fund, the central banks and all institutions, governments have kept the inflation down for some meaningful period. Therefore soft landing is increasingly a possibility,” the FM told the Washington based think tank, adding that reasonable growth numbers will come from even the advanced economies
She said the coordinated action between countries to manage any supply chain shocks that emerged in the last two years have helped them face it with a lot more preparedness and therefore the sense is “ we can only have better days than what we have seen in the last few years.”
The FM, however, said that the picture that is emerging about the global economy was positive but cautioned it won’t rapidly change the situation and said the control over fiscal deficit would be a challenge for most countries. She said there should be gradual efforts to bring the fiscal deficits in these countries to “ some reasonable number.”