FM in Oslo – Norway investment in India? Poor Rich India!
Finance Minister, Chidambaram starts a three-day visit to Norway tomorrow. During the visit, he will hold bilateral discussions with his counterpart, Ms. Kristin Halvorsen. The two Ministers had met earlier in March, 2007 during the visit of the Norwegian Finance Minister to India. As the main outcomes of the meeting, Ms. Halvorsen had indicated the possibilities of the Norwegian pension fund making investment in India (out of their corpus of over US$ 320 billion); suggested possibilities for utilizing our technical manpower strength.
During the visit, the two Ministers are likely to discuss wide ranging issues of mutual interest particularly related to strengthening of bilateral economic ties in the sectors where either India or Norway have some advantage like information technology, Food processing, hydrocarbons, fisheries, shipping & ship building, hydro-electricity, tunnelling and environment.
Chidambaram will also meet the Governor of the Central Bank of Norway, the Norges Bank. Norway's Pension Fund-Global which has a huge corpus of more than US$ 350 billion is being managed by the Investment Management (NBIM) division of the Norges Bank. NBIM is currently registered with SEBI in India and has started investments in India from July 2005 and as per SEBI, the purchase value of Norges Bank investments in India on 04.10.07 was Rs. 2107 cores ($ 533 million). While GPF-G investment in India has crossed half a billion dollar mark in two years time from its registration with SEBI in June, 2005, the figure is only 0.15% of the total corpus of GPF-G. Finance Minister's meeting with Governor of the Norges Bank is very important in this context.
Chidambaram is being accompanied by a Business delegation consisting of members of CII and FICCI, CMD of the Punjab National Bank and a representative of Shipping Corporation of India. The Finance Minister is also scheduled to visit the prestigious Noble Institute at Oslo for delivering a keynote address on the topic “India's Socio-Economic Agenda: Development with Democracy
Today we also bring you the FM's speech at Harvard University, his alma mater, where he said,
INDIA IS RICH BECAUSE | INDIA IS POOR BECAUSE |
|---|---|
of its natural resources | It is unable to exploit those resources efficiently and profitably |
of its native entrepreneurial talent | Many policy and procedural hurdles stand in the way of the entrepreneurs. |
of its young population | it is unable to deliver quality education to all its children |
of its traditional systems of medicine and its capacity to adopt modern medicine | of the weaknesses in the system to deliver basic medical services to rural India |
of its strengths in concept and design of programmes | of lack of accountability and reluctance to punish the wrongdoers. |
its people and its businesses save and invest | of its obsession with outlays rather than outcomes. |
its people set great score by values and moral standards | of declining standards in public life |
its people are hardworking, resilient and pragmatic | often commonsense is devoured by ideology. |