Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Tuesday invited American investors to invest in India and be part of the South Asian country’s amazing growth story where the national economy is transparent, open, and watchable.
Sitharaman, who is leading a high-powered delegation to Washington DC to attend the Annual Spring Meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, made a strong pitch before the American business community, saying the atmosphere of positivity is the result of the pathbreaking and futuristic reforms, including the nationwide drive for digitalization, being undertaken by Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led government since 2014.
Addressing a luncheon meeting of the US-India Strategic and Partnership Forum, she said digitalization has had a very strong impact on the Indian economy, bringing transparency, the media reported.
While nearly 40 percent of the Indian economy was grey in the pre-2014 era, now the government has incentivized and digitized many transactions, providing concessions and onboarding people onto the national digital system.
“Now, the Indian economy is not small, (it is) transparent, open, watchable if you want to use that word. With all these developments, therefore, for the next 25 years in the budget, we proposed that India should become an Artificial Intelligence (AI) hub,” the Finance Minister said.
“We’ve proposed three centers of excellence in the premier institutions like the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), for advanced research into AI and develop new tools to ease the life of businesses and householders,” she said.
“India wants to lead in the AI area. Other than that, of course, hydrogen emission was announced in the last budget and we have made sure in this year’s budget that green hydrogen gets all the importance,” Sitharaman said.
Citing PM Modi’s vision to transform India into a developed economy in the next 25 years, she said the government has specifically identified these coming years to make India free from the relics of imperial rule.
“So, by 2047, we expect India…meeting the aspirations of our youth…You’re looking at a very high potentially youthful, very skilled population which is going to contribute to India’s growth,” Sitharaman said.
The Finance Minister also discussed debt vulnerabilities and other key issues with Gita Gopinath, the First Deputy Managing Director of the IMF, on Tuesday.
Sitharaman congratulated Gopinath for accelerating India’s work on the Global Sovereign Debt Roundtable along with the World Bank and reiterated India’s commitment to foster efforts to address growing debt vulnerabilities, the Finance Ministry tweeted.
During the meeting, the FM noted the IMF’s concerns on key downside risks to the economy, including financial sector stress, rising real interest rates, elevated debt, inflation, geo-political fragmentation, and faltering growth in China, as highlighted in the IMF’s World Economic Outlook (WEO).
Gopinath congratulated Sitharaman on the fruitful discussions that translated the February consensus on the need for a globally coordinated policy response on crypto assets into an agreed set of guiding principles and an action plan on crypto assets, the ministry said in a tweet.
Sitharaman acknowledged the global lender’s support to the G-20 Presidency of India in 2023 in the form of inputs towards developing evidence-based policy guidance.
In Washington DC, the Indian FM also met with her US counterpart, Secretary of Treasury Janet Yellen, during a delegation-level meeting on the sidelines of the World Bank-IMF Spring Meetings 2023 on Tuesday.