Government Reforms Need To Focus On Domestic Investments, Says NITI Aayog’s Amitabh Kant

Over the last four years, the Indian government has been focussing on growing multiple sectors of the economy to achieve its target of making India a $10 Tn economy by 2031. For this, the initial target is to make India $5 Tn by 2025. Just over five years away, this target has kept all the government departments in hyper-drive to drive innovation, investments and reforms.

For such plans, India needs to grow at 8%-9% yearly, EY report has said. And to achieve this yearly GDP growth, NITI Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant believes structural reforms are needed which will boost domestic investment and savings levels, especially from individuals.

He has further said that similarly, stability, predictability and consistency in policies can boost and maintain investor confidence. However, in contrast, he also believes that the government has introduced too many reforms which has led to slow down.

These reforms include introduction of goods and services tax (GST), the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC), Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act (Rera), the Monetary Policy Framework, a focus on ease of doing business, and formalisation of the economy, enhanced foreign direct investment (FDI) limits, recognition of the scale of the non-performing asset (NPA) problem, and subsequent recapitalisation of public sector banks (PSBs).

At the Bloomberg NEF summit held in New Delhi, Kant said, “One of the reasons for the slowdown is that it has had too much of reforms — GST, IBC, RERA — a huge set of reforms which we have undertaken and I think the next round of reforms must revolve around sectors like oil and gas, mining, coal. We must commercialise coal mining, railways and they will really drive the growth in India.”

Along with the $5 Tn economy vision, the government is working heavily towards ensuring 30% e-mobility by 2030. This is because it doesn’t want to lose out on EV revolutions.

Kant said that, “We have lost out on the mobile revolution, photo-voltaic revolution, telecom equipment revolution. We are a nation of massive domestic demand, but all this demand we import. We will not allow that to happen in the EV world. We will ensure that India becomes a global hub for manufacturing and exports.”

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