He asked top government officials to move on road to success in governance by taking ‘responsibility, ownership, accountability and discipline (ROAD).
Winding up the day-long deliberations and review on ‘make in India’ initiative launched in September this year, the prime minister asked central government officials to involve all states in the effort to make India a ‘manufacturing hub’.
Without announcing the details of the one-year and three-years plans put together for 25 sectors, Modi said the daylong consultations reflected his regime’s thrust of ‘minimum government and maximum governance’. He said his government was ready to break the silos, speed up processes, change rules and amend laws. This assumes significance as the Union cabinet on Monday decided to bring about changes in land acquisition laws through a presidential ordinance and also finalise the blueprint for building 100 smart cities.
Referring to stakeholders’ consultation held during the day, Modi said his government has added a new paradigm to concept of public private partnership (PPP). Finance minister Arun Jaitley and commerce and industry minister Nirmala Seetharaman held discussions with different industry bodies, investors and other stakeholders to formulate sector-specific plans for ‘make in India’.
The prime minister will meet chairmen of private and public sector banks to ensure that there was adequate flow of funds for companies to take up both greenfield and expansion projects. He asked top officials to focus on making eastern states as large centres of manufacturing given their rich natural resources and bring them on par with western states.
He also emphasised on movement of 5Ms as crucial to making India a huge manufacturing hub: men, money, machinery, materials and minerals. Modi reiterated the need for building ‘brand India’ globally by offering equipment and services famous for ‘zero defect and zero effect’.
He maintained that human resources development, innovation and research would be focus of his government. Modi asked other sectors to take achievements in ‘space’ as inspiration to achieve excellence in manufacturing of products.
Earlier, top officials made presentations on ease of doing business, skills development, revenue, leather and leather products, gems and jewellery, capital goods, automobiles and auto components, oil and gas, power, chemicals and petrochemicals, basic metals and cement, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, food processing, textiles, tourism, information technology, aerospace and defence, aviation, space, shipping, railways, medium and small enterprise, renewable energy, media and entertainment sectors.
Finance minister Arun Jaitley also nudged the RBI governor Raghuram Rajan to cut interest rates. RBI has maintained the benchmark repo rate (the rate at which banks borrow from the central bank) since January this year. “The cost of capital and, I think, in recent months or years, is one singular factor which has contributed to the slowdown of manufacturing growth itself,” Jaitley said. Manufacturing has recorded a negative growth of 7.6 per cent in October while overall industrial production registered negative growth of 4.2 per cent in the month.
“The credit off-take is slow, infrastructure creation becomes slower, the manufacturers find it difficult to afford costly capital, because it is going to add to each one of their costs. And, therefore, this is one area where each one of us has to be concerned about,” Jaitley said. After both retail and wholesale inflation dropped to record lows and finance minister pitching for rate cut earlier, RBI had left policy rates unchanged on December 2.
The finance minister has also cited policy paralysis in last one decade for the manufacturing in India to perform badly. “We can’t have a policy which is occasionally changed and half way through our businesses, we find that there is different policy… retrospective taxation, because of the absence of stability, became a defining moment against India globally,” he said.
Talking about ease of doing business, he said not only do entry barriers have to be lowered there is also a need to provide an enabling environment to continue doing business here. “We have to ask ourselves why each investor is today insisting on international arbitration where the venue is not India. It is because our domestic systems have a tendency to interfere too much in the domestic tribunals/international tribunals created for the purposes of dispute resolution mechanism,” he said referring to arbitration issues in cases such as Vodafone.
badarinath
@mydigitalfc.com
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