India gets 480 pc rise in FDI inflows in Dec '06

New Delhi, Feb 27: Foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows into India rose an unprecedented 480 per cent during December 2006 over the inflows in December 2005, Union Commerce and Industry Minister Kamal Nath indicated here today.

"We received equity inflow of 2.04 billion US dollars in December 2006 compared to 0.35 billion US dollars in December 2005. This is the highest inflow ever into the country in a single month," he said.

With this, the total inflows from April to December 2006 are now about 9.3 billion dollars against 3.5 billion dollars received during the same period last year.

The total inflows in 2005-06 stood at 5.5 billion dollars. By March-end, it was expected that the country would receive more than 12 billion dollars of FDI equity inflows, he said.

The Index of Industrial Production (IIP) in December 2006 went up by 11.1 per cent over the corresponding month of the previous year. The manufacturing sector, which has an almost 80 per cent weightage in the index, went up by 11.9 per cent.

The overall IIP grew by 10.8 per cent between April-December 2006 over the previous year, which recorded 8 per cent rate of growth.

The Minister expressed satisfaction over the pace of growth saying that his Ministry was expecting this to be further enhanced in the last quarter of the year, so that during 2006-07, the growth rate of industry can reach almost 11 per cent and the manufacturing rate of growth go beyond 12 per cent.

Meanwhile, as part of the continuing exercise to streamline the Industrial Policy, in January 2007, the Ministry of Commerce and Industry notified the de-reservation of 87 items from the list of items reserved for small-scale industry.

In a meeting of the Advisory Committee held last week, it was decided to further de-reserve 125 items from that list and a notification to that effect will be issued shortly.

With this, 212 items would have been de-reserved, leaving only 114 items reserved for SSI units.

UNI