Revisions in FDI, FII norms important for overall economy

Excerpts from Bazaar on CNBC-TV18 Watch the full show » RELATED NEWS FIIs net buy of USD 84.2 mn in equity on Nov 5 CII strongly welcomes RBI measures ALSO READ See what other CNBC-TV18 anchors have to say Nifty BSE | NSE 10/02/12 Are Mutual Funds betting on Nifty?

Commenting on the FII and FDI holding changes that are being considered for various sectors, CNBC-TV18's Udayan Mukherjee said the revisions in FDI norms is extremely material not just for a particular sector but for the overall market and economy at large. "We will have much bigger constraints on growth going forward. So, we absolutely need to do this and they need to do this as quickly as possible."

Here is a verbatim transcript of Udayan's comments on CNBC TV18. Also see the accompanying video.

This could be quite significant if it comes in and I dare say it would be much more significant than the small tinkering, which is going on with External Commercial Borrowing (ECB) etc. The one big problem for which sectors like infrastructure and many smallcaps and midcaps have got butchered in this fall, is that people have been absolutely ruthless towards companies, which need capital to grow because the market has clearly seen that raising capital, and particularly equity capital over the next year and the year and a half is going to be extremely challenging.

In this kind of an environment it is unwise for the government to actually insist on any kind of curbs, which might let the flow of capital in into specific companies. You could do it for a sector like banking, which is politically sensitive, and I don't think that even this FDI and FII norms if they change will probably touch that public sector banking space. But that aside there is no logic or justification to artificially curb any kind of flows, which might come in. We keep hearing a lot about bank credit being loosened up, the Finance Minister talking to banks to lend that's the debt side of the story.

But a very important part of the story, which needs to be addressed with equal importance, is the kind of equity raising which happened over the last couple of years, which I think was absolutely fundamental in driving the engine of growth for a large number of companies in India and if that has stalled - 2008 has been virtually no capital raising. If we get through another 4 to 6 quarters of this kind of situation, then I suspect you will see the kind of capex reversals, which will be extremely crippling for the manufacturing and for the services sector.

Some individual sectors will benefit more, like telecom, media broadcasting, may be defense equipment. In some, where caps are close to being hit, if the segregation happens between FII and FDI, it will probably materially mean more for some of these companies and that too it may take a while for the money to come in. Because right now people do not want to put a whole lot of money to put to work in India or any other emerging market. But whenever market stabilizes, if you just keep that, clear that headroom for money to come in, it is the best thing you can do at this point in time.

So this is extremely material not just for a particular sector but for the overall market at large and the economy at large, which is starved of capital flows now, without which I think we will have much bigger constraints on the growth going forward. So we absolutely need to do this and they need to do this as quickly as possible.