In a significant effort to save India’s brand equity, commerce and industry minister Anand Sharma met captains of Indian industry in the last couple of days to discuss ways to improve the country’s image as the most preferred destination for investments.
A day after he met the who’s who of Indian industry under the aegis of the Confederatin of Indian Industry and then held a brainstorming session with some of the corporate honchos under Ficci.
The issues discussed in the last two days included speedy introduction and implementation of the National Manufacturing Policy (NMP), a liberal foreign direct investment regime, easy credit flow and softening of rates.
“We discussed our shared concerns on the slowdown, capacity building not taking place, problems of capital formation. The time has for the government and industry to work together and bring in a turnaround as far as industrial production and investment,” Sharma told reporters here today after the meeting at Ficci.
Among those he met were Naina Lal Kidwai, Harsh Pati Singhania, S.K. Roongta, B. Muthuraman, Sunil Kant Munjal, Deepak Puri, Pramod Bhasin, Ajay Chaudhuri, RC Bhargava, Vijay Thadani, Rakesh Bharti Mittal, Ajay Shriram and Vinayak Chatterjee.
On the NMP, he said a committee of secretaries under the prime minister’s principal secretary was fine-tuning it, after the in-principle approval by the high level committee chaired by the prime mMinister. He said the policy was inevitable now and states should be ready to benefit from it. Adding that Rajasthan, Maharashtra and Gujarat were already gearing up to tap the benefits by the proposed NMIZs, he added.
On Wednesday Sharma had announced the creation of a joint task force that would ensure greater dialogue between the government and industry addressing several concerns.
The task force would be headed by the minister while at the support level in the second tier secretary of Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion would be heading the body.
