President Pranab Mukherjee made a strong pitch for West Bengal as an attractive investment destination, and said that the state now had an appropriate investment climate.
“Bengal has truly emerged as an investment-destination,” he said at the inauguration of the Bengal Global Business Summit 2017.
“The required industrial infrastructure is now in place and since 2011, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has held two successful business summits.”
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Inflation under control
Mr. Mukherjee, who was the Minister of Finance from 2009 to 2012, said that the macro-economic parameters of the country were strong and inflation was well under control. However there was a need for “stable, lower and acceptable” interest rates which he felt would further attract investments.
The country’s current account deficit has shaped up because of “prudent” fiscal management and the economy has been growing in the past decade despite the 2008 global financial crisis, the President said.
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India’s economy has shown resilience in the past 10 years, he said adding that the economy had grown consistently.
Although the traditional markets (North America and Europe) had shrunk new export markets have opened up among the ‘Asian Tigers’ and “we have been able to manage our external sector,” he said.
Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee said that the state’s strategic location made it an ideal investment destination for tapping the markets in North East India and South East Asia.
Industrialist Sanjiv Goenka, Kishore Biyani, Rakesh Bharti Mittal and Pankaj Munjal of Hero Motors promised to invest more than ₹15,000 crore by 2020 in the state.