Need to make our banks key part of global trade: PM Narendra Modi

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday said India’s banks and currency need to be made an important part of global trade and supply chains.

At an event of the ministries of finance and corporate affairs, the prime minister asked financial institutions to continuously encourage good corporate governance practices.

Modi said India has developed various financial inclusion platforms and there is a need to create awareness about them for their optimum utilisation.

“It is necessary to focus on how to make our domestic banks and currency an important part of international supply chain and trade. We have shown in the past eight years that if India collectively decides to do something, then India becomes a new hope for the world,” the PM said.

“Today, the world is looking at us not just as a big consumer market but with hope and confidence as a capable, game-changing, creative, innovative ecosystem,” he said.

Reducing the number of state-owned banks and creating bigger PSBs with greater global reach has been a stated policy of this government, and there have already been four rounds of bank mergers.

The prime minister launched the ‘Jan Samarth portal’, a credit-linked portal of 13 government schemes, to ensure ease in credit availability to youth, entrepreneurs and farmers, and a special series of coins that are also ‘visually impaired friendly’.

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, who also attended the event, said each of these schemes will be displayed on the portal. “This portal is going to make it easy so that a citizen does not have to ask the same questions every time to avail himself a government programme.”

The coins of Re 1, Rs 2, 5, 10, and 20 denominations will have the Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav (AKAM) design. They are not commemorative coins and will be part of the circulation.

“These new series of coins will remind people of the goal of Amrit Kal and motivate people to work towards the development of the country,” Modi said while addressing the iconic week celebration.

The Jan Samarth portal will be an ‘end-to-end delivery platform’, and more people will come forward to avail of loans because of ease of compliance, he said.

The prime minister emphasised that the youth and the entrepreneurs have been kept at the heart of the reforms the country has undertaken in the past eight years.

“By reducing more than 30,000 compliances, abolishing more than 1,500 laws, and decriminalising several provisions of the Companies Act, we have ensured that Indian companies not only move ahead but also achieve new heights,” he said.

The PM said the country is seeing the result of simplification in indirect taxes by bringing in Goods and Services Tax (GST).

Now, it has become normal for GST collection to cross Rs 1 trillion every month, he said, adding there has been a constant increase in EPFO registrations, while the GeM portal has brought in new ease for government procurement. The purchase figure for the GeM portal has crossed 1 trillion, the PM said.

Modi said India currently has 70,000 start-ups and every day a dozen new start-ups are getting added.