India shall reform economic policy to attract FDI

The Dollar Business Bureau

The Indian Government needs to bring about reforms in its economic policy, to attract foreign direct investment (FDI) needed to build infrastructure, quoted Nisha Desai Biswal. There is a serious need for the government to modernise and reform its economic governance in order to improve its ease of doing business, increase trade activity and attract the required FDI, said Nisha Desai Biswal, Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia in the US Department of State.

Nisha Desai was addressing the 33rd Annual Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Lecture at the University of California in San Diego. Suggesting various measures to attract more FDI into the country, she said that India needs to update its intellectual property regime to protect its innovations and technology. Predictability, transparency and consistency must be ensured in its corporate tax code. An effective mechanism should be in place to resolve the disputes.

The Modi government has already initiated some steps in this direction to see faster FDI inflows. Bilateral investment treaty and Goods and Services Tax (GST) are the two important aspects of the government to enhance the confidence in foreign investors, Biswal said.

She further said that Prime Minister Narendra Modi is determined to achieve 175 GW clean energy by 2022 and the US is also committed to helping India achieve this target. This would in the long run help in handling the global challenges of pollution and other environmental concerns, Biswal said.

She said India-US relations would enhance with American companies bringing cutting-edge technology and their best practices to India. The trade between both the countries has seen five-fold growth in the last 15 years, to reach $100 billion per annum. And the US is planning to expand trade to $500 billion per annum, she informed.

In the past 15 years, US companies have invested around $30 billion in India. Indian firms too have invested more than $11 billion in the US, which has created over one lakh jobs in the country. Therefore, boosting the trade between the countries is of special interest to the US, she added.