Opening mkt access has to be 2-way process: Nath

New Delhi, Jan 7: Declaring that the 21st century belonged to the developing world, India today made it clear to rich nations that they maust address the legitimate concerns of the developing world while seeking access to their booming markets.

''Opening market access, as recent global trade negotiations have demonstrated, has to be a two-way mutually beneficial process in which the developing world's legitimate concerns demand reflection," Commerce and Industry Minister Kamal Nath said, addressing the 5th Pravasi Bharatiya Divas here.

He noted that emerging economies like India, Brazil and South Africa had shown to that world the voice of the developing countries could no longer be ignored by the world's developed economies.

Mr Nath said the developing countries were now playing an increasingly significant role in the world economy--not just as traditional producers of cost-effective goods and services but as significant consumers of these products as well.

Economists around the world were saying that the 21st century belonged to emerging economies, he said and drew attention to the world's top investment bank Goldman Sach's prediction that the famous BRIC grouping of Brazil, Russia, India and China would be the world's largest economies by 2050. The prediction was based on hard economic facts and not perception, he added.

Coming to the Indian growth story, Mr Nath said after 15 years of economic reforms, it would be no exaggeration to say that India had moved up the value chain of global perception. India's economy registered an average growth rate exceeding 8 per cent during the last 3 years.

He told the NRI delegates from nearly 50 countries that India was trying to reinvent itself. In this connection, he pointed out that the government had divested some of its powers of apporoving foreign invstments that it exercised through the Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB) and had placed them under the RBI. Similarly, the FDI cap for aviation had been hiked from 40 per cent to 49 per cent. The government had also approved sweeping reforms in FDI with a first step towards partially opening retail markets to foreign investors.

To improve ties with the overseas Indian community a single window agency called Overseas Indian Investment Promotion Council is being set up. ''This council will have liasion with state governments so that investment in the state is smooth and they get cooperation from the state governments,'' Mr Nath said. The remittances from NRIs has emerged as a stable source of foreign exchange inflows into the country. in 2004, remittances from NRIs into India were 21.7 billion dollars.

Mr Nath also stressed on the need to improve the infrastructure to international levels for attracting more investments and to make the home industry more competitive. In this regard, ''investments amounting to 350 billion dollars in various sectors of infrastructure like roads and highways, ports, airports and telecom are envisaged over the next five years,'' he pointed out.

With an aim to meet the ''challenge'' of making the economic growth more inclusive by bringing more and more people to the market, the Commerce Minister suggested a multi-pronged strategy involving increasing employment opportunities in the non-farm sectors in rural areas, making the weaker section of the society more entreprising, imparting standard education to all and providing greater avenues to the backward sections in employment.

UNI