'India has emerged as an attractive investment destination'

With a strong leadership at the Centre and the central banking institution, India has turned out to be an "attractive investment destination" in the past one year, a top American investor banker said today.
"India is perhaps one of the nicest stories from an investment perspective. You have strong leadership, both at the government and at the Central Bank. But you also have a lot of tail winds," Gerardo Rodriguez, head of emerging market multi-asset strategies at Blackrock told Bloomberg News TV in an interview.
"This (India) is a story where we are seeing the benefits of lower commodity prices that can benefit the world. So clearly you have now monetary policy action on the back of some space that was created by a more benign inflation environment with lower oil prices," he said when asked about the Indian growth story.

The banker pointed out the factors of "a reform momentum" and "some tail winds from the monetary policy side" that are helping the country to become "a very attractive investment proposition both from equity and fixed income perspective".
Responding to the recent reports of India overtaking China to become the world's fastest growing economy by clocking 7.5 per cent GDP for the March quarter, Rodriguez said that the trend can be hard to believe.
"There were some revision in numbers just recently in India. So we need to sort of rescale that in order to see what the right comparison to China is.

"(it is) Really hard to think that India is actually growing faster than China. But ultimately in a low nominal growth environment," he noted.

The top investment banker also expressed his company's wish to invest in India.
"Well absolutely yeah. The story of emerging market is that individual countries are getting to a certain scale in which it will be harder to talk about them as a group. They're very different in nature politically and economically," he said.
"And because of that it sort of makes more and more sense to talk about the possibilities of domestic-driven growth especially on the back of reform momentum as the case of India. That's pretty much the dominant narrative in emerging economies," he added.