Finance Minister P Chidambaram has emphasised the need to increase investments, especially in infrastructure sector to revive India’s economic growth. At present, Indian economy is struggling with slowdown and its growth has slowed down to a decade low of 4.5 percent in FY13 and was at 4.6 percent during the first three quarter of FY14.
The Finance Minister added that the global economy has shown signs of strengthening over the past few months and policies to revive growth in most emerging markets, including India, will have to be rooted in increasing investments, particularly in infrastructure. Chidambaram further asserted that as most of the emerging markets are resource constrained, it is necessary to have recourse to foreign savings for investment and urged the Asian Development Bank to increase its annual lending capacity to $ 20 billion in the next ten years. Finance Minister further stated that the fund flow to emerging countries should be stable adding that the best option would be investment flows through Foreign Direct Investment (FDI).
The infrastructure development is a most critical prerequisite to boost the economic growth. However, the government has been taking various measures to boost the infrastructure sector’s growth. It has set the $1-trillion investment target for the 12th Five Year Plan (2012-17) to overhaul its infrastructure sector such as ports, airports and highways to boost growth. Further, in order to expedite the implementation of infra projects, the government has set up Cabinet Committee on Investment (CCI). Till January 2014, the CCI had cleared around 296 projects with estimated project cost of Rs 6,60,000 crore.