The Hindu Business Line : Pressing the advantages at India Investment Forum

THERE is more than one way of looking at the two-day meeting of the India Investment Forum organised by Euromoney Institutional Investor and hosted by Merrill Lynch and the State Bank of India Group.

In the first place, Official India is seeing this as a serious opportunity to stress the nature and scope of the reform process underlining the fact that there is no looking back, perhaps only looking at how reform could be put on a "faster" track.

Secondly, in highly detailed and very technical ways, officials have sought to highlight what indeed are the available and emerging opportunities in India, which would include giving the legal frameworks of investments and what could be expected down the line.

On the first day, those kinds of presentations came from the Housing Development Finance Corporation led by Mr Deepak Parekh, the SBI Chairman, Mr A.K. Purwar talking of his Group being in the "land of opportunities", and the various opportunities in the areas of infrastructure such as ports, civil aviation and the general nature of power sector reform in India.

Senior officials participating in this session included the Joint Secretary, Ports in the Department of Shipping, Mr A.K. Jain and the Secretary in the Ministry of Civil Aviation, Mr Ajay Prasad.

The third dimension came by way of the big hitters of Corporate India — from the Reliance Group, the Chairman and Managing Director, Mr Mukesh Ambani and a luncheon presentation by the Chairman of the Tata Group, Mr Ratan Tata. Between the two, prospective institutional investors got a view of where the two major corporate entities are in the context of reforms of the past and in the several opportunities available in the private sector down the road.

On a different level, participants were able to get a picture of what the private sector in India thinks on a number of things pertaining to the Indian Government policies — obvious focus on reforms and the procedural stumbling blocks, real and perceived. Mr Ambani and Mr Tata spoke about their respective groups' activities in the global setting as well.

"India does present tremendous opportunities and some risks," noted Mr Tata, pointing out that since the reform process, there have been far less restrictions on growth.

Interestingly, he also made the point that if there were restrictions on what could be done in India that need not necessarily be placed at the doorsteps of the Government — rather that domestic industries also play a role in manipulating an environment for obvious reasons.

And, as a case in point, he talked about his group trying to bring a quality domestic airline in partnership with Singapore Airlines which fell through for one reason or another and not just on the percentages of what was and was not allowed in the realm of foreign investment.

By and large, if there is optimism in official and private circles of what is going to materialise out of this Institutional Investment Forum, it is not on what is about to concretise in dollars and cents at the end of two days — rather in a realisation that a serious attempt has been made and in a setting that has not been seen before.