The Hindu : Business : India to emerge as ‘manufacturing hub’

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Tuesday, Jan 06, 2009
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India to emerge as ‘manufacturing hub’

Hasan Suroor

LONDON: Despite the economic slowdown, India is set to emerge as a “major manufacturing power-house”, Swraj Paul, the U.K.-based Indian industrialist, said on Monday.

While acknowledging that investment in India was likely to fall in the short to medium term because of a decline in economic growth, Lord Paul reaffirmed his commitment to India and said that his company, the multinational Caparo Group, would continue to invest in his native country. “I still have no doubt that we would be able to turn India into a manufacturing power-house,” he said speaking on BBC’s Hardtalk programme.

Asked whether investment would slow down, especially after the Mumbai attacks, he said it was ``bound to” but not to the extent that some predicted.

“But I don’t think it is going to be as bad as people think because lot of people including foreign investors are of my view that this waking up of the government is going to come only by the anger of the people and not because of some foreign investors,” he said. Lord Paul, however, warned that 2009 would be a difficult year for Indian with economic growth likely to plummet to about five per cent because of the global meltdown.

"My view is that we may see 5-5.5 per cent economic growth. I think it will go down further because India at this moment in the manufacturing industry is not very different from the experience you had in Britain and the US," he said adding that it might take time for investor confidence to return. Lord Paul criticised the Government for not doing enough to alleviate poverty and said that “unless you are going to alleviate poverty all this great talk about ’we are getting to be a developing nation’ is false.”

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