Tel Aviv: Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal on Thursday rolled out the red carpet for Israeli businesses to invest in India’s fast-growing economy with “limitless opportunities” in the technology, pharmaceuticals space and defence sectors.
Addressing the India-Israel Business Summit along with Nir Barkat, Israel’s Minister of Economy and Industry, Goyal said, “India’s investor-friendly, predictable atmosphere to do business provides huge opportunities for business persons from both sides. The opportunities in technology could be FinTech, could be Agritech, could be artificial intelligence, could be quantum computing.”
Highlighting the strong fundamentals of the Indian economy, the minister said, “Our growth is high, our inflation is low, our forex reserves are at an all-time high of about 700 billion dollars, our banking system is strong with very low non-performing assets.”
He further stated that the country has a very robust and focused investment in infrastructure, consistently above 130 billion dollars every year, to sustain this growth momentum in the future.
Explaining the strength of the country’s infrastructure, Goyal pointed out that India has one electricity grid throughout the whole nation, not regional grids like many other parts of the world.
He also underscored the uniformity in taxation with one goods and services tax across the country and a single direct tax, which provides a stable business environment. This is in sharp contrast to many other countries have different rates of tax even within a country, he added.
Goyal underlined the “10 Ds that define the India growth story. Democracy, decisive leadership, demand, the demographic dividend, diversity, digitalisation, decarbonisation, and being very focused on sustainability. Determination of 1.4 billion young Indians, the fast pace of development and most importantly element which summarises all of them is dependability, trust,” the minister added.
Speaking on the occasion, Nir Barkat said, “The Israel-India partnership is a win-win and extremely valuable. We recommend our Israeli entrepreneurs to think about India, to collaborate with Indian companies that scale, that understand the scope, and that understand how to be very cost-effective in large numbers. The partnership translates to a lot of capital, to a lot of success, and then the next deal is even better.”
“I believe that when we marry the platform, the innovation platform, with the huge industrial power, the huge scope of India, that translates really, really well to win-win economies. So I believe that both Piyush Goyal and myself see that this relationship is something extremely valuable,” the Israeli minister added.
Piyush Goyal is on a visit to Israel from November 20-22. He is accompanied by a 60-member business delegation, facilitated by CII, FICCI, Assocham and Startup India, on the invitation of the Minister of Economy and Industry of Israel, Nir Barkat.
Goyal will hold high-level bilateral meetings with senior Israeli leadership. Apart from Barkat, he is also expected to meet other ministers.
(IANS)
