Consul general says he hopes the city will invest there as it has done on the mainland
STUART LAUstuart.lau@scmp.com
PUBLISHED : Friday, 21 August, 2015, 2:00am
UPDATED : Friday, 21 August, 2015, 2:00am
Prashant Agrawal
India's top diplomat in Hong Kong has called on the business community here to do in his country what it has done in China for 30 years: help transform it into a manufacturing powerhouse.
Prashant Agrawal, the Indian consul general to Hong Kong and Macau, spoke in an interview after Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government vowed last year to put up US$1 trillion worth of infrastructural projects for overseas ventures as part of its five-year plan.
Hong Kong enjoyed an important position in New Delhi's "Look East" policy in spite of the rise of mainland China, Agrawal said.
"When mainland China was [opening] up, Hong Kong companies took the lead in setting up factories in the mainland and providing capital. We want them to take the same process in India," Agrawal said.
He said India had a "huge requirement for physical infrastructure" such as ports, highways and power plants, as well as the need to modernise the railway system. "These are all areas where companies from Hong Kong have the expertise, skills, experience and capital," he added.
With an abundance of capital and technical knowledge, Hong Kong businesses helped transform mainland China, especially the Pearl River Delta, since the country's opening up in the 1980s. India, with 50,000 of its people living in Hong Kong, is currently aiming to follow in China's footsteps to become the world's factory.
But the difficulty of doing business there has always been a matter of concern, with the World Bank ranking India at 142 among 189 countries and regions.
"We have undertaken a series of reforms to promote ease of doing business in India," Agrawal said.
The Ministry of Commerce and Industry has already taken measures and has proposed a series of steps including reducing the time to register a business to one day, a single registration of all labour laws and a cut in taxes.
Modi's "Make In India" campaign, meanwhile, hopes to attract worldwide investments in manufacturing, Agrawal said.
Since April 2000, Hong Kong's total foreign direct investment in India was US$1.21 billion, a fraction of the US$214 billion it had invested worldwide, said Sanjeet Singh, a director of India's Ministry of Commerce and Industry
http://m.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/article/1851313/india-looks-hong-kong-direct-investment-akin-mainland-china
