India in Davos, Economywatch.com

By: EconomyWatch   Date: 30 June 2010

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India's Tripled Participation In Davos Justifies "India Everywhere" campaign.

Delegates have arrived at Zurich airport for the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos. Among the world's fastest growing free-market democracies, India's campaign of "India Everywhere" is justified only when we see the number of delegates have increased to 80 from 30 in the last year.

For judging from the Davos programme, India is the only country of the moment. From the total 244 scheduled sessions, a dozen are devoted to India, twice as many as last year, while 60 feature Indian speakers.

Nandan Nilekani, chief executive of software giant Infosys, who has spearheaded the "India Everywhere" campaign, overseen by the Confederation of Indian Industry says,Presently, India's appeal stretches from Wall Street to Broadway; from Capitol Hill to Cannes. Infosys and 21 other blue chips, including Reliance Industries and Ranbaxy, have chipped in half the $4m cost.

The campaign is a tacit recognition that India may have only a limited window to translate today's unprecedented interest into hard investment. The government has dispatched what it calls its "dream team" of economic reformers - led by P. Chidambaram, finance minister, Kamal Nath, commerce minister, and Montek Singh Ahluwaliah,deputy chairman of the Planning Commission.

Structural and infrastructural barriers until now meant that India, for all its promise, received just 0.8 per cent of global foreign direct investment (FDI) - less than $6bn. FDI is needed to fund a precarious current account and to lift investment rates to the levels required to achieve double-digit economic growth.

Mr. Nilekani says," India has become one of the prominent players in the field of global economic context. World Economic Forum is the ideal place for projecting ourselves,"

Mr. Nath has claimed a question that the question for chief executives at Davos is not "should my company go to India?" Rather "can my company afford not to be in India?"

Chief ministers of Delhi, Kerala and Rajasthan, three among the five Indian states attracting the bulk of FDI, will ram the point home to investors over Indian-sponsored Happy Hours and at the Davos grande soirée on Saturday, organized by India for the first time in a decade. "The objective is to say: 'We're open for business'," says Ajay Khanna of India Brand Equity Foundation, part of the Confederation of Indian Industry

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