Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Thursday said the recently announced India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor is strategic and will be an economic game changer for India and others.
Presenting the Interim Budget 2024-25 in Parliament on Thursday, the Minister quoted Prime Minister Narendra Modi, 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”.
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Sitharaman said that the country showed the way forward and built consensus on solutions for those global problems.
The Minister said that the Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) inflow during 2014-23 was USD 596 billion marking a golden era. She highlighted that it is twice the inflow during 2005-14, adding that “For encouraging sustained foreign investment, we are negotiating bilateral investment treaties with our foreign partners, in the spirit of ‘first develop India’.”
Highlighting the global context, she said geopolitically, global affairs were becoming more complex and challenging with wars and conflicts.
She noted that globalisation is being redefined with reshoring and friend-shoring, disruption and fragmentation of supply chains, and competition for critical minerals and technologies. A new world order is emerging after the COVID-19 pandemic, she added.
The Minister stated that India assumed the G20 Presidency during very difficult times for the world. She highlighted that the global economy was going through high inflation, high interest rates, low growth, very high public debt, low trade growth, and climate challenges.
