India negotiating bilateral investment treaties with foreign partners
Minister for Finance & Corporate Affairs Nirmala Sitharaman said that the recently announced India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor is a strategic and economic game changer for India and others.
While presenting the Interim Budget 2024-25 in Parliament on 1 Feb, the Minister quoted the Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, as saying that the corridor “will become the basis of world trade for hundreds of years to come, and history will remember that this corridor was initiated on Indian soil”.
Highlighting the global context, Sitharaman said that geopolitically, global affairs are becoming more complex and challenging with wars and conflicts.
She noted that globalization is being redefined with reshoring and friend-shoring, disruption and fragmentation of supply chains, and competition for critical minerals and technologies.
The Minister said that the Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) inflow during 2014-23 was US$596 billion marking a golden era.
“For encouraging sustained foreign investment, we are negotiating bilateral investment treaties with our foreign partners, in the spirit of ‘first develop India’,” she said at the budget presentation. Fiinews.com
