Summit concludes with no major announcements

The three-day India Economic Summit, organised by the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), concluded here on Thursday without much participation from India Inc. Although Union ministers of finance, power, coal, road, and rural development attended the event, Prime Minister Narendra Modi did not attend the event.

However, WEF and CII sought to allay the impression that the event evoked a lukewarm response.

Replying to questions about the thin attendance, CII director-general Chandrajit Banerjee said: "We had a good participation from the international investors and more importantly, all of them went back with a good image of India."

According to Banerjee, the message from the government is loud and clear that it is the beginning of new era in India. Most ministers participated in the Summit and held closed-door meetings with the investors, he added.

"I feel international investors are particularly interested in the manufacturing sector and there was also a huge focus on high-technology and defence sectors. Overall, I feel it was a very successful Summit," said Banerjee.

Philipp Rosler, managing director of WEF, said the event has managed to create a community of interest in India and now it is time for action by all the stakeholders.

A participant at the Summit said there should have been more participants from the government side. When pointed out that many ministers from the Modi Cabinet - finance minister Arun Jaitley; road transport & highways, shipping and rural development minister Nitin Gadkari; coal minister Piyush Goyal; human resources development minister Smriti Irani- did come and make announcements, he said the government does not mean only ministers but bureaucrats as well. He said bureaucrats can give better insight to decisions than ministers. Industry secretary Amitabh Kant had attended the session on 'Make in India', closed for the media.

Talking at the event, Jaitley spoke about privatising loss-making public sector unit, Irani informed the gathering about the new credit transfer in education in India, and Goyal pegged investments in the power sector at $250 billion in the next five years.

Richard Rekhy, chief executive officer of KPMG India, said the government should have used the opportunity to make some announcements as the whole world was looking at the event. According to him, such announcements could have cleared the impression that India is getting a worse place to do business, as was indicated by the recent World Bank rankings on the ease of doing business. India slipped two notches to 142 in the recent rankings compared to that in 2014.

James Hogan, CEO of Etihad Airways, said it had been a tough journey for his company in the past 12 months to make sure it navigates with the investment flows. "The Sebi process, the Competition (Commission of India) process...," he went on.

Reposing faith in the new government, he said: "This is the India we look forward to. I think the key issues about investment in any country are transparency, bureaucracy... 12 months down the track, we are pleased with the progress we have made."

He said there are challenges in infrastructure, transport, education and health in India.

Anand Mahindra of Mahindra & Mahindra, Sunil Mittal of Bharti group, Uday Kotak of Kotak Mahindra Bank, and Yorihiko Kojima of Mitsubishi Corporation, also participated in the event.