PM Narendra Modi to meet top industry leaders on global economic scene
By ET Bureau | 8 Sep, 2015, 06.26AM IST
PM Narendra Modi will tomorrow hold a wide-ranging discussion on global economic scenario with business leaders, including Reliance Industries head Mukesh Ambani, Tata Group Chairman Cyrus Mistry as well as bankers and economists.
NEW DELHI: PM Narendra Modi will interact with top Indian business tycoons such asMukesh Ambani, Cyrus Mistry, KM Birla and Sunil Mittal along with RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan, top bankers and leading economists on Tuesday in a rare meeting against the backcloth of plunging stock market indices, a weakening rupee and fears about global economic growth triggered by the China slump.
The meeting, the first time that such high-profile industry leaders are expected to sit across the table with the PM in the nearly 15 months he has been in charge, is expected to highlight India's relative attractiveness amid the growing global gloom and exhort the assembled corporate bosses to step up their investments.
Close to 40 people are expected to attend the closed-door meeting at the PM's Race Course Road residence in Delhi.
NEW DELHI: PM Narendra Modi will interact with top Indian business tycoons such asMukesh Ambani, Cyrus Mistry, KM Birla and Sunil Mittal along with RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan, top bankers and leading economists on Tuesday in a rare meeting against the backcloth of plunging stock market indices, a weakening rupee and fears about global economic growth triggered by the China slump.
The meeting, the first time that such high-profile industry leaders are expected to sit across the table with the PM in the nearly 15 months he has been in charge, is expected to highlight India's relative attractiveness amid the growing global gloom and exhort the assembled corporate bosses to step up their investments.
Close to 40 people are expected to attend the closed-door meeting at the PM's Race Course Road residence in Delhi.
"The Prime Minister has regularly met top bosses of major global corporations and had also met industry chambers individually a couple of months ago," one official familiar with the matter said. However, this is the first time the PM is hosting a meeting of this kind, a normal practice during the Manmohan Singh era.
The meeting is being held at a time nervousness is rising whether India's incipient economic recovery could falter because of global factors, led by the Chinese slowdown and rising fears of a flight of capital from emerging markets, including India, in the event of a US interest rate increase.
Already, Indian stock market indices are near levels where they were when the Modi government took charge on May 26 last year.
Indian stocks tumbled to a 15-month low on Monday, with the benchmark Sensex slipping below the 25,000-point mark for the first time since June 2014, closing 308 points down at 24,893.81. The Sensex, which has fallen almost 11% since August 11, the day China first devalued its currency, is just 177 points away from its May 26 level.
The rupee hit a fresh two-year low against the dollar on Monday, closing 0.5% down at 66.82. It has fallen 4.6% since the yuan devaluation by China.
These are not the only causes for concern. Adding to the nervousness, India's GDP growth too slipped to 7% in the April-June quarter, down from 7.5% in the previous quarter, with analysts attributing the slippage in the growth clip to tepid investments by industry.
Gross fixed capital formation rose 4.9% in Q1FY16, a four-quarter high, but well below potential and with the gains mostly attributed to public investments. The private corporate sector, saddled with debt and excess capacity in many sectors, has been in a wait-andwatch mode for some time now, focusing more on balance sheet repair than fresh investments.
Officials said Tuesday's meeting, to be kicked off by Finance Minister Arun Jaitley and Chief Economic Advisor Arvind Subramanian, will focus on the opportunities the global economic turmoil could throw up for India.
"A wide-ranging discussion is expected on the impact of recent economic events, and how best India can take advantage of them," a government statement said, adding that the meeting will have more than 40 delegates, including cabinet ministers, top government and RBI officials, industry representatives, bankers, economists and sectoral experts.
"The PM is expected to speak after hearing out their views and ideas," said the official aware of the meeting that is expected to last a little over two hours.
CII President and Tractors India CMD Sumit Mazumder, Ficci President and CMD of Bharat Hotels Jyotsna Suri and Assocham President and YES Bank CEO Rana Kapoor would also be present at the meeting.
"The PMO wants to focus the discussion on what opportunities India could exploit and has sought perspectives and ideas from different players, including economists and financiers. We hope the government will take some of those ideas and implement them soon to spur the economy," Mazumder told ET.
The Modi government has not reconstituted the Prime Minister's Council on Trade and Industry that met regularly under the UPA government and included the who's who of India Inc. Towards the end of UPA's second tenure in office, India Inc had regularly used the forum to call for urgent reforms to salvage a slowing economy.
The NDA's victory at the 2014 Lok Sabha polls had been received with great enthusiasm by industry as it expected the Modi regime to take forward critical reforms that were left hanging by the Manmohan Singh government.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi asks industry to take risk, invest; India Inc wants rate cut
By Vikas Dhoot, ET Bureau | 8 Sep, 2015, 02.59PM IST
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The meeting is being held at a time nervousness is rising whether India's incipient economic recovery could falter because of global factors, led by the Chinese slowdown and rising fears of a flight of capital from emerging markets, including India, in the event of a US interest rate increase.
Already, Indian stock market indices are near levels where they were when the Modi government took charge on May 26 last year.
Indian stocks tumbled to a 15-month low on Monday, with the benchmark Sensex slipping below the 25,000-point mark for the first time since June 2014, closing 308 points down at 24,893.81. The Sensex, which has fallen almost 11% since August 11, the day China first devalued its currency, is just 177 points away from its May 26 level.
The rupee hit a fresh two-year low against the dollar on Monday, closing 0.5% down at 66.82. It has fallen 4.6% since the yuan devaluation by China.
These are not the only causes for concern. Adding to the nervousness, India's GDP growth too slipped to 7% in the April-June quarter, down from 7.5% in the previous quarter, with analysts attributing the slippage in the growth clip to tepid investments by industry.
Gross fixed capital formation rose 4.9% in Q1FY16, a four-quarter high, but well below potential and with the gains mostly attributed to public investments. The private corporate sector, saddled with debt and excess capacity in many sectors, has been in a wait-andwatch mode for some time now, focusing more on balance sheet repair than fresh investments.
Officials said Tuesday's meeting, to be kicked off by Finance Minister Arun Jaitley and Chief Economic Advisor Arvind Subramanian, will focus on the opportunities the global economic turmoil could throw up for India.
"A wide-ranging discussion is expected on the impact of recent economic events, and how best India can take advantage of them," a government statement said, adding that the meeting will have more than 40 delegates, including cabinet ministers, top government and RBI officials, industry representatives, bankers, economists and sectoral experts.
"The PM is expected to speak after hearing out their views and ideas," said the official aware of the meeting that is expected to last a little over two hours.
CII President and Tractors India CMD Sumit Mazumder, Ficci President and CMD of Bharat Hotels Jyotsna Suri and Assocham President and YES Bank CEO Rana Kapoor would also be present at the meeting.
"The PMO wants to focus the discussion on what opportunities India could exploit and has sought perspectives and ideas from different players, including economists and financiers. We hope the government will take some of those ideas and implement them soon to spur the economy," Mazumder told ET.
The Modi government has not reconstituted the Prime Minister's Council on Trade and Industry that met regularly under the UPA government and included the who's who of India Inc. Towards the end of UPA's second tenure in office, India Inc had regularly used the forum to call for urgent reforms to salvage a slowing economy.
The NDA's victory at the 2014 Lok Sabha polls had been received with great enthusiasm by industry as it expected the Modi regime to take forward critical reforms that were left hanging by the Manmohan Singh government.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi asks industry to take risk, invest; India Inc wants rate cut
By Vikas Dhoot, ET Bureau | 8 Sep, 2015, 02.59PM IST
Post a Comment
Finance Minister Arun Jaitley expressed hope that it would by rolled out, Mazumder said, adding the land bill did not come up for discussion.
NEW DELHI: Prime Minister Narendra Modi has asked India Inc to take risks and step up investments, saying India's improved macro-economic and fiscal indicators were a good backdrop for investments.
"While the government has a role to play, industry also has a role to play in demand creation for investments," the prime minister said after a nearly three-hour meeting with top industrialists, financiers and bankers.
"The PM has adopted a hands-on approach with the economy to ensure that the momentum picks up before it's too late," said one of the industry captains who attended the meeting.
Modi and Finance Minister Arun Jaitley were listening for most of that time, with a dozen top government officials studiously taking notes on the ideas and concerns raised by industry captains that would be examined for further action.
The stalled reforms to the land acquisition law, a persistent dampener for industry, was only alluded to through a reference to 'political opposition', but Jaitley is learnt to have exuded confidence that the Goods and Services Tax regime will be introduced "sooner rather than later".
"The prime minister and FM virtually advised secretaries and top officials to work towards improvements in the areas of concern flagged by each industrialist. The government has signalled the strong will to improve the regulatory landscape so that there's a genuine rebound in investments and the economy," said Yes Bank CEO Rana Kapoor.
"The PM was emphatic that risk-related entrepreneurship should not be subdued, but catalyzed. A lot of new investments could be made in soft infrastructure like affordable housing, hospitals as well as hard infrastructure like roads and highways," Kapoor said.
CII president Sumit Mazumder said the government made the point that India is relatively insulated from the China crisis, which is likely to re-appear. "We pointed out that though the government has done a lot to improve the ease of doing business, a lot more needs to be done," he said.
In fact, the ease of doing business, the problems faced by stalled projects, stressed corporate and bank balance sheets were recurrent concerns raised by most industrialists present.
The stock market see-sawed in the first couple of hours of trading on Tuesday, but picked up steam and was over 400 points higher by 3 pm.
The prime minister was keen on using the Mudra Bank to catalyse small and medium enterprises and urged industry leaders to adopt innovation clusters and focus on innovation, skill development and entrepreneurship initiatives. He spelt out the need to re-orient programmes like the MGNREGA towards skill-oriented spending, so that people have a permanent employable skill.
Chief Economic Advisor Arvind Subramanian made a strong case that India is in a relatively good place amid the current global economic turmoil and the 'base case for growth is now very clear,' said industry officials present at the meeting.
Minister of State for Finance Jayant Sinha, Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu, Road Transport and Shipping Minister Nitin Gadkari and ministers of state holding independent charge — Nirmala Sitharaman (commerce and industry), Dharmendra Pradhan (petroleum and natural gas) and Piyush Goyal (power, coal and renewable energy) were also present at the meeting.
Reliance Industries' chairman and managing director Mukesh Ambani, Aditya Birla Group head Kumar Mangalam Birla, Adani group chairman Gautam Adani and Tata group chief Cyrus Mistry attended the meeting along with Wipro boss Azim Premji, Sun Pharma CMD Dilip Sanghvi, ITC's YC Deveshwar, IL&FS chairman Ravi Parthasarathy and TVS Capital's Gopal Srinivasan.
Eight economists, 14 industry representatives and four top financiers, including SBI chief Arundhati Bhattacharya, ICICI Bank's Chanda Kochar, IDFC's Rajiv Lall and CEO of the recently-launched Bandhan Bank Chandra Shekhar Ghosh, were also present.
"While the government has a role to play, industry also has a role to play in demand creation for investments," the prime minister said after a nearly three-hour meeting with top industrialists, financiers and bankers.
"The PM has adopted a hands-on approach with the economy to ensure that the momentum picks up before it's too late," said one of the industry captains who attended the meeting.
Modi and Finance Minister Arun Jaitley were listening for most of that time, with a dozen top government officials studiously taking notes on the ideas and concerns raised by industry captains that would be examined for further action.
The stalled reforms to the land acquisition law, a persistent dampener for industry, was only alluded to through a reference to 'political opposition', but Jaitley is learnt to have exuded confidence that the Goods and Services Tax regime will be introduced "sooner rather than later".
"The prime minister and FM virtually advised secretaries and top officials to work towards improvements in the areas of concern flagged by each industrialist. The government has signalled the strong will to improve the regulatory landscape so that there's a genuine rebound in investments and the economy," said Yes Bank CEO Rana Kapoor.
"The PM was emphatic that risk-related entrepreneurship should not be subdued, but catalyzed. A lot of new investments could be made in soft infrastructure like affordable housing, hospitals as well as hard infrastructure like roads and highways," Kapoor said.
CII president Sumit Mazumder said the government made the point that India is relatively insulated from the China crisis, which is likely to re-appear. "We pointed out that though the government has done a lot to improve the ease of doing business, a lot more needs to be done," he said.
In fact, the ease of doing business, the problems faced by stalled projects, stressed corporate and bank balance sheets were recurrent concerns raised by most industrialists present.
The stock market see-sawed in the first couple of hours of trading on Tuesday, but picked up steam and was over 400 points higher by 3 pm.
The prime minister was keen on using the Mudra Bank to catalyse small and medium enterprises and urged industry leaders to adopt innovation clusters and focus on innovation, skill development and entrepreneurship initiatives. He spelt out the need to re-orient programmes like the MGNREGA towards skill-oriented spending, so that people have a permanent employable skill.
Chief Economic Advisor Arvind Subramanian made a strong case that India is in a relatively good place amid the current global economic turmoil and the 'base case for growth is now very clear,' said industry officials present at the meeting.
Minister of State for Finance Jayant Sinha, Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu, Road Transport and Shipping Minister Nitin Gadkari and ministers of state holding independent charge — Nirmala Sitharaman (commerce and industry), Dharmendra Pradhan (petroleum and natural gas) and Piyush Goyal (power, coal and renewable energy) were also present at the meeting.
Reliance Industries' chairman and managing director Mukesh Ambani, Aditya Birla Group head Kumar Mangalam Birla, Adani group chairman Gautam Adani and Tata group chief Cyrus Mistry attended the meeting along with Wipro boss Azim Premji, Sun Pharma CMD Dilip Sanghvi, ITC's YC Deveshwar, IL&FS chairman Ravi Parthasarathy and TVS Capital's Gopal Srinivasan.
Eight economists, 14 industry representatives and four top financiers, including SBI chief Arundhati Bhattacharya, ICICI Bank's Chanda Kochar, IDFC's Rajiv Lall and CEO of the recently-launched Bandhan Bank Chandra Shekhar Ghosh, were also present.
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