Finance minister Arun Jaitley said India’s economic growth prospects for the current year is improving with the improvement in monsoon rains.
Speaking an interaction with representatives of Silicon Valley companies such as Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle, Google, Cisco, First Solar, Aemetis, Ebay and so on, Jaitley said monsoon predictions are improving and with it the prospects of the agriculture sector doing better.
This would in turn put the economic growth prospects on an even better footing, he said according to CII, which co-organized the event.
He also said India’s manufacturing sector had started to do much better after a protracted period of slowdown.
Touching on some of the challenges, Mr Jaitley mentioned that the ease of doing business would need constant monitoring and improvement and eventually for growth to gain traction it was imperative that private sector investments picked up.
Mr Rajiv Mehrishi, Finance Secretary, while answering specific questions from US companies stressed that the government is working to create an organized way to deal with change not just in policy regime but administration as well.
Government efforts are “ work in progress” though there is already significant progress on contentious issues like implementing a direct tax regime and GST regime, smoothening taxation disputes, easing land acquisition and labor regulations and so forth. All these incremental but important reforms would cumulatively help cultivate an environment for growth and development.
The CII-USIBC roundtable kicked off the first major interface for the Finance Minister during his visit to California which will also include several interactions with long term investors, institutional investors as well as members of the Indian diaspora in the Silicon Valley.