India strong on growth potential, talent pool: Experts

Foreign investors see tremendous growth opportunities in India and can infuse FDI  worth about USD 250 billion a year, but they want a guarantee for a progressive and investment friendly policy framework, a top management guru has said.

"If we want to take the FDI from the current USD 20-30 billion to about USD 250 billion a year, the investors making this investment would need to see the progress that has been made to guarantee him growth," MIT Sloan School of Management's deputy dean SP Kothari told PTI.
"The investors would ask for a policy framework that is progressive and investment friendly," Kothari said ahead of the Citi-MIT Sloan Symposium being jointly organised in New Delhi by Citibank and MIT Sloan School of Management.
The MIT Sloan School of Management, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is one of the world's leading business schools and some eminent MIT alumni members, along with business leaders and policymakers, talked about 'securing India's rightful place in the economic and financial world' at the symposium held in the national capital.
Talking about India's growth potential, Pankaj Vaish, MD and head of markets at Citi South Asia, said that India can think of growing FDI to over ten times of the current level.
"There are opportunities in areas like manufacturing and food processing, where FDI can help in containing inflation. We need to imbibe the global best practices which we can learn from global corporations who would bring in this FDI.
"It is not merely about the foreign money, but the access the money gets in terms of better products and services. FDI worth USD 25 billion is good, but minuscule when compared to the size and opportunity of India. Our goal should be 8-10 times of the current level of FDI investment," Vaish said.
"I believe we should aim for 20 uninterrupted years of around 10-percent GDP growth. It should be our single-minded goal as a nation," he added.
Kothari said that there is a tremendous fascination about India among the global investors.
"India offers many opportunities for rest of the world, the first and foremost being its huge talent pool that is one of the best in the world and very well trained," he said.
"Those who think of India as an investment destination, also think of thse benefits. When they taste india, they say it is phenomenal in terms of growth opportunities on many dimensions," Kothari said.
However, there are other dimensions where they feel that things could have been better and those are the areas where leaders and policymakers need to work, he added.
"India has made great strides in becoming more open and more investor friendly, but there still remains areas where progress has not been of desired levels," Kothari said.
"India needs to show that it has overcome the hurdles and there would not be roadblocks for the investments being committed, as what we are talking about is an investment of USD 200-250 per person," he added.