Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi asked India Inc to take risks and step up investments even as industry leaders pressed for interest rate cut and more policy action to improve ease of doing business.
"Prime Minister has said that industry must take risk and increase investments...we must go out and invest. Industry has a role to play," CII president Sumit Mazumder told reporters after the meeting of Prime Minister with CEOs, bankers, economists and bureaucrats on the global economic slowdown.
Several industry leaders, meanwhile, pitched for interest rate cut saying it would help them take risks and scale up investments. "Prime Minister said this is an opportunity for us to take advantage and invest...cost of capital is too high but I don't know how many people can go ahead to take risk and invest... many of us raised the issue of interest rate," Ficci president Jyotsna Suri said.
Assocham president Rana Kapoor said that Prime Minister asked industry to "catalyse risk taking ability". He said the issue of capital requirement of banks to meet economic growth and the need to bifurcate bad assets of the banking system came up for discussion. As far as the Goods and Services Tax (GST) implementation is concerned, finance minister Arun Jaitley expressed hope that it would by rolled out, Mazumder said, adding the land bill did not come up for discussion.
The industry leaders who attended the brain storming session with Modi on 'Recent global events: Opportunities for India' were Reliance Industries chairman Mukesh Ambani, Tata Group head Cyrus P Mistry, Aditya Birla Group head Kumar Mangalam Birla, Sunil Bharti Mittal of Bharti Airtel and ITC chief Y C Deveshwar.
Reserve Bank governor Raghuram Rajan as well as road transport and highway minister Nitin Gadkari, power minister Piyush Goyal and oil minister Dharmendra Pradhan were also present.
