Cost of doing business in India still 'intimidating': GE official

The GE Vice-Chairman John Rice, praises Modi govt for a host of initiatives taken up to woo investors

Cost of doing business in India "is still intimidating at times" and the government needs to bring it down to tap the investments waiting on the sidelines, global conglomerate GE's Vice-Chairman John Rice on Friday said.

While acknowledging that the country is open to doing business, Rice said the goal for India is to benchmark it against the best in the world.

"From our perspective, a company which has been around for 100 years, India is open for business," Rice said while speaking at the ET Global Business Summit here.

While praising the Modi government for a host of initiatives taken up to woo investors, he, however, said there's a lot more to do.

"The operational cost of doing business here is still intimidating at times. Paper work, taxes, so many processes, all of that can be improved. We all know that the government is working on it," he said.

Stressing that the "work still has to be done", Rice said: "We can't compare ourselves where India was yesterday or last year or year before. The benchmarks are global when you think of cost of doing business, we have to compare with the best globally where you think about speed and doing it faster."

He said the real benchmark should be if "we can do it faster than everybody, when you do that you are on a global scale".

Highlighting the significance of such a target in wooing foreign investor, Rice said, "there is a lot of capital still sitting on the sidelines waiting to be accepted and invest in India at a right pricing, a right market signal in oil and gas and other industries... "

He cited GE winning the tender from Railways after years of wait and multiple cancellations, as an example of how India was ready to do business.

Underling the significance of India, he said five years ago the discussions were all about BRICS but today two of the BRICS countries are on "life support, while India stands tall".