News Analysis India

Tag: Uday Kotak

  • TNIE Expressions | ‘Involve private sector in vaccination drive’

    The government should rope in the private sector for Covid vaccine distribution, according to India’s top industrialists.Talking to TNIE Editorial Director Prabhu Chawla on Thursday, Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) president Uday Kotak said he has written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi on this.

    TVS group chairman Venu Srinivasan, CII director-general Chandrajit Banerjee, and Bajaj Finserv MD Sanjiv Bajaj also sat down with Chawla as part of TNIE’s Expressions, a series of live web casts with people who matter.

    “At CII, we have constituted a task force and we are closely interacting with the government on the need of the involvement of corporates in the process. We have to expedite the vaccination. During my interaction with Serum Institute, I learnt that although we are supplying vaccines fast, they are keen on distributing faster,” Kotak said.

    Banerjee said vaccinating industrial workers should also be a priority of the government. While terming FM Nirmala Sitharaman’s budget bold and transparent, the industrialists said big capex and higher allocations towards infrastructure and health sectors will provide the much-needed boost to the ailing economy. Srinavasan said fiscal deficit should not be a matter of concern and the objective should be long-term growth. 

    “For years, we have been crying hoarse over increasing investments in infrastructure and this certainly is a phenomenal aspect of the Budget. There are some sectors deeply impacted like hospitality, tourism and aviation. We are expecting some measures in these areas.

    Infrastructure investments bring long-term returns. One has to remember, we are not a working-capital economy. We need infrastructure development,” Srinavasan said. Bajaj said a growth-oriented policy will help the financial services sector achieve strong double-digit growth. 

  • Modi meets foreign investors today as India looks to attract investments for infrastructure

    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.