Excerpts from CNBC-TV18's exclusive interview with Harshad Patwardhan:

Q: How is the Indian market positioned right now, as you are entering the market?

A: We remain very bullish on the Indian market; we are already one of the largest investors into the Indian market.

We have close to USD 6 billion of India dedicated money invested into the Indian market through our FII vehicles. We have also been in India for a long time; our oldest funds have been around for 3-14 years.

Yes, this is our new fund as far as the domestic business is concern.

But we have been in India for a long time managing large pools of money. We remain confident on the prospects of the Indian market, in the medium to long term.

Q: What have the JP Morgan global funds been doing in the last 3-6 months while most funds have a fairly cautious approach in India because of the interest rates situation, earnings slowdown etc?

A: During the last calendar year, which is the reported performance, we underperformed benchmark only by 1%, but we were ahead of most of our competitors.

Our philosophy has been always to look at the long term.

In fact, that is one of the differentiating factors that we have vis-à-vis many other competitors.

We tend to look at long term and short term volatility, which will always be there in the Indian market;we have seen it over the last 10-15 years.

So we tend to use it more as an opportunity rather than get victimized by it.

Q: What will you do? Will you manage the portfolio actively here or will it reflect or mirror the 5 funds that you manage offshore?

A: One of the key features of our investment process is the team approach, what we call - ‘two geographies one team’.

We have a team based out of Hong Kong of 3 fund managers looking at the offshore funds; we have team here in India of 4 investment professionals.

So we look at, discuss, debate on the ideas collectively; it’s a fairly collaborative research approach. So to that extent, some of the thinking that we have in the offshore funds is likely to get reflected for the domestic fund.

But there are various things which are different.

For example, the money that we have in offshore funds is about USD 6 billion; the domestic funds to start with, will be at least be smaller than that.

Also we will not face here, some of the constraints faced by my offshore team. So it will not be a mirror image; but to an extent it will reflect similar investment philosophy and process.

Q: What is your take on the whole interest rates and inflation situation out here and how would you approach it as you start putting the money to work?

A: As far as inflation is concern already the headline inflation has started coming down and we believe it will come down further. On interest rates our view is that it is closer to peak now. So essentially this whole fixation about headline inflation number, once it starts trending down then that should be a time which should be positive for the equity. I would say that we are launching a fund at an appropriate time.

Q: How do you look at India relative to some of the other global markets since you have that emerging market perspective? We are still about 10% below our highs, most other Asian markets have cruised to well above their previous highs, do you see this kind of divergence continuing?

A: One of the key advantages that we have at JP Morgan Asset Management is the team approach for the India team.

What we tend to do is extend this team approach beyond.

We have lot of investment professionals who are looking at China, Korea, Taiwan and various other markets based out of Hong Kong. So we tend to get a lot of perspective on other markets as well.

In addition to that, we also have a team out of our London office that manages global emerging markets money; they have prospects to offer in Latin America and Eastern Europe.

Considering all that, we continue to be very positive on the Indian market. If you look at emerging market as a whole, the proportion for India is only 6% in some of the benchmark indices.

We believe that’s grossly underrepresented. The kind of corporates that we have in India vis-à-vis some of the other emerging markets, we have absolutely no doubt in our mind that the potential for Indian market is very positive indeed.

For more Mutual Fund Interviews click here