CII chief meets PM on improving business confidence

Discusses issues relating to lifting business confidence and making the environment easy for India Inc

S (‘Kris’) Gopalakrishnan, the newly elected president of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and Infosys CEO, on Monday called on Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and discussed issues relating to the macro-economy, lifting business confidence and ease of doing business in India.

Kris told Business Standard that he and with other CII dignitaries talked to the Prime Minister on lifting business confidence and making the environment easy for India Inc to accelerate economic growth.

On the macro-economy, the CII dignitaries — president-designate of the chamber Ajay Sriram and director general Chandrajit Banerjee — talked of the need to bring down the Centre’s fiscal deficit and the country’s current account deficit (CAD).

According to Kris, the Prime Minister said there was a need to accelerate economic growth, bring more investment into the economy and improve confidence of India Inc.

The CAD reached a record 6.7 per cent of GDP in the third quarter of 2012-13 and policy makers are pinning hopes on the fourth quarter to see a somewhat moderate level of CAD at five per cent.

The fiscal deficit is pegged at 5.2 per cent in the Revised Estimates (RE) for 2012-13, a tad higher than 5.1 per cent in the Budget Estimate (BE) but slightly less than 5.3 per cent projected in the fiscal consolidation road map.

Finance Minister P Chidambaram had said final figures would show the deficit lower than 5.2 per cent of GDP in 2012-13.

For the current financial year, the fiscal deficit is pegged at 4.8 per cent.

Kris said the discussion was an update on the theme of the annual general meeting of the CII, inaugurated by the Prime Minister last week. The theme was ‘India Tomorrow: Imperatives of Growth, Security and Governance’.

In his speech to CII, the Prime Minister had laid stress on greater investments in the economy to accelerate annual GDP growth to eight per cent in the medium term from the estimated decade low growth of five per cent in 2012-13.

The investment rate in the economy used to be 38.1 per cent of GDP in the pre-crisis period of 2007-08. It declined to 34.3 per cent in 2008-09. In 2012-13, investment rate was projected to be 35.3 per cent, higher than the crisis period, but way below the 2007-08 level.

The CII Business Confidence Index, which had slipped below the psychological 50-mark in the third quarter, rose to 51.3 in the final quarter. Though up from 49.9 during the third quarter, it is much below the 52.9 mark during the same quarter of 2011-12.

India stood at 132 among 185 countries in terms of ease of doing business ranking, by International Finance Corporation, the private sector lending arm of the World Bank.