U.S. business groups speaking to a visiting delegation of Indian parliamentarians in Washington DC said that in the aftermath of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent visit “Most of the feedback [on bilateral economic cooperation]… is very gung-ho,” even if there have been some questions about when specific bills may be expected to pass in Parliament.
Speaking to media here the multi-party group of Indian Members of Parliament described a range of meetings that they held with U.S. counterparts including, members of the administration and Capitol Hill, policy experts, and industry specialist members to develop and strengthen bilateral engagement in a Track II mode.
Baijayant ‘Jay’ Panda of the Biju Janata Dal and Chair of the India-U.S. Forum of Parliamentarians (IUFP) was joined by colleagues including Jyotiraditya Scindia and Gaurav Gogoi from the Congress, Kalvakuntla Kavitha from Telangana Rashtra Samithi and Arpita Ghosh from the Trinamool Congress, all of them participating in a delegation organised by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industries (FICCI).
On the response from corporate America, Mr. Panda said: “There are three or four issues that keep coming up – there is an issue of whether things are getting stalled in Parliament, and they are not. People focus on the monsoon session and one or two major bills. But the earlier sessions, where the insurance reform and others got passed, are not being taken in context.”
However, he and his colleagues noted that with economic “good news” rolling in recent days, including an improvement in the Indian economy’s FDI run-rate and the World Economic Forum’s competitiveness ranking jump for India, some of their interlocutors actually said that they were “150 per cent bullish”.
Mr. Gogoi emphasised that the meetings had been an opportunity to apprise the U.S. side of the concerns of Indian companies seeking to do business here.
He said: “It’s not only about the ease of business for American companies trying to do business in India, it is vice-versa, too. What we raised at public forums and in meetings is that India exports so much of food products [such as] basmati rice and mangoes and they are getting stuck because of differences in labelling… warehousing … and store-housing procedures. This is something that goes back impacting agricultural livelihoods and state revenues.”
