Headlines
Jaitley urges US firms to invest in India towards $500 bn trade
New Delhi, Sep 14
Ahead of the first India-US
Strategic and Commercial Dialogue (SACD) in Washington later this month,
Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Monday invited American business to
invest in India towards realising the target of quintupling bilateral
trade.
"Today, our ambitions are very high, to increase of
bilateral trade five-fold over the current levels," he said at the 11th
economic summit here organised by the Indo-American Chamber of
Commerce.
"Both India and the US are natural allies, both
democracies. While the US has the financial capital and advanced
technology, India has a large body of trained manpower, natural
resources and a large market," he added.
India is the second
largest source of foreign direct investment in the US, and the largest
in Britain, the minister added. India-US trade currently has an annual
turnover of $100 billion.
Jaitley said that ensuring a
predictable taxation regime in India and improving ease of doing
business "are works in progress", while efforts have been made to evolve
a very "fair" taxation regime.
The minister said declining oil
and other commodity prices in this phase of global financial turmoil
have helped India as the country is a net importer of commodities.
US
Ambassador to India Richard Verma said Prime Minister Narendra Modi's
forthcoming visit to the US, especially to San Francisco and the Silicon
Valley, has generated a lot of excitement as he will be the only second
Indian prime minister to visit California after Jawaharlal Nehru.
Modi
will also visit Facebook headquarters in California, the social
networking site's co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on
Sunday.
Noting that a decade ago, the US and India did very
little defence trade, the envoy said his country has signed around $10
billion worth defence sales contracts with India.
"Our defence
cooperation has helped promote India's role as a security provider in
the Indian Ocean region, with direct benefit to third countries," he
said.
"Now we are taking the security partnership to a new level
as we embark on co-development and co-production of defence
technologies," he said.
Verma also noted that according to a
recent survey of 100 Indian companies in the US, "91,000 jobs were
created and $15 billion has been invested in the US".
"Indian companies collectively have a geographical footprint in every state in the nation," he said.
During his June visit to the US, Jaitley had sought to allay concerns of American investors on retrospective tax demands.
In
an interaction at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, he
said: "I have no difficulty in saying that any decision which is
retrospective, except in some very unusual circumstances, which creates
fresh liabilities is certainly not acceptable.