Prime Minister Narendra Modi will woo the world’s 20 largest pension and sovereign wealth funds at a virtual round table Thursday as India looks to attract investments for its ambitious Rs 111 lakh crore infrastructure investment pipeline for the next five years.
The Modi government’s efforts to attract foreign investments into the infrastructure space comes at a time when around half of the proposed infrastructure investments by 2025 will have to come from private and foreign investors.
To attract these funds to invest in India, it has already announced tax exemptions in this year’s budget to these long-term funds investing in infrastructure, making their income exempt from long-term capital gains, interest and dividend tax.
The call for investment
The virtual global investor roundtable, organised by the Ministry of Finance and the National Investment and Infrastructure Fund, will be attended by global investors who represent regions like the US, Europe, Canada, Korea, Japan, Middle East, Australia and Singapore, and have an asset under management of $6 trillion, the Prime Minister’s Office said in a statement.
The roundtable will also be attended by Indian business leaders like Mukesh Ambani, Ratan Tata, Deepak Parekh, Nandan Nilekani and Uday Kotak, and Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman and Reserve Bank of India Governor Shaktikanta Das.
It will be followed by individual meetings of the investors with the PM over the next couple of weeks.
Repeated efforts
This is not the government’s first attempt to woo foreign investors.
Just ahead of PM Modi’s visit to the US last year, his government had announced a massive reduction in corporate tax rates to make India competitive vis-a-vis other Southeast Asian economies. The rates were brought down to as low as 15 per cent (effective tax rate of around 17 per cent) for new companies in the manufacturing sector.
