India a bright spot amid global uncertainties: Industry execs

New Delhi: India’s demographics, its digitization drive, energy transition plans, and focus on driving innovation will continue to make the country an attractive market amid the prevailing volatility and uncertainty in global markets, said top industry officials in a panel discussion at the Mint India Investment Summit 2023 in Mumbai.

Janmejaya Sinha, chairman India, at Boston Consulting Group, said India’s scale would enable it to drive itself to become a $7 trillion economy in seven years, and a larger economy from thereon.

“The biggest thing that’s going to happen is a level of scale, which is not evident, which is not possible in most parts of the developed world, and most parts of the developing world. So that level of scale, no one can ignore,” he said. New Delhi’s response to the pandemic through a supply-side stimulus without going ‘overboard’ along with a calibrated fiscal and monetary policy approach helped steer the country away from the macroeconomic headwinds faced by other countries, said Sanjiv Chadha, MD and CEO, Bank Of Baroda. “The fact that we did not go overboard I think that was something which was really fundamental. Because once you go overboard, when it comes to the fiscal outcomes to the monetary policy, coming back on track is enormously disruptive. And that is the disruption that we are seeing now all over the world,” he said.

Meanwhile, focus on innovation in terms of products and services that can be taken to global scale in the coming years will also stand India in good stead, said Vishal Mahadevia, MD and Head India at Warburg Pincus. He added that the conservative approach of the Reserve Bank of India has also helped keep the impact of the financial crisis faced by some key US banks away from the stock markets.

Srini Nagarajan, MD and Head Asia at British International Investment, said the government’s energy transition programme as it moves to create renewable energy capacity on solar and wind, would also put India at par with developed economies at a time when it has promised to achieve net zero emissions by 2070, instead of 2050.

“We are really thinking about how to move away from coal in a very systematic manner. We are embarking on a kind of a distributed generation in this country, not depending too much on the grid, both on the CNI side and any form of localized solutions which we are finding, which is pretty unique in this country,” he said.

Ameera Shah, MD, Metropolis Healthcare said healthcare and culture would be equally critical for India in the coming decade, primarily because the healthcare sector was fragmented with little government regulation.