Blitz Bureau
SAN FRANCISCO: India’s Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman met global CEOs, pension fund managers and other institutional investors here, reported IANS. She discussed the opportunity for collaboration in the domain of energy and sustainability, the Rs 1 lakh crore ($12 billion) corpus private sector–driven research, development, and innovation scheme, and GIFT-IFSC, among others, said the report.
In the presence of Finance Secretary Ajay Seth and Vinay Mohan Kwatra, Ambassador of India to the US, the Finance Minister listened to their views on the reforms pursued by the Indian Government, and gave feedback and observation on the existing policy framework.
They spoke about their keen interest and commitment for a deeper and broad-based investment collaboration between the US and India and shared feedback on how to further facilitate and enhance the investment experience.
The minister thanked the participants for their feedback and suggestions. In her one-on-one meetings with top CEOs, FM Sitharaman discussed opportunities in the fields of AI, Cloud and digital infrastructure.
Jonathan Siddharth, CEO of Turing, expressed his desire to see India at the forefront of AI revolution and spoke about working in the domain of AI with India. The FM highlighted policy framework that has been put in place by India for AI, and encouraged him to explore opportunities for collaboration. Debanjan Saha, CEO at DataRobot, expressed interest in participating in the AI Centre of Excellence. The minister underlined the steps that the Government has taken over years to boost digital infrastructure, including budgeting Rs. 10,300 crore for IndiaAI Mission.
She informed Saha about the potential opportunity through the proposed Rs. 1 lakh crore corpus for private sector-driven research, development, and innovation. In her meeting with Anjney Midha, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, and VMware CEO Raghu Raghuram, the minister discussed the remarkable transformation in technology space. She also met Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud and his team.
India is changing, and so are its women, says FM
During her address at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in the US, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said India is changing, and so are Indian women. For working women, maternity leaves have been increased to six months, she told the gathering. “Two years ago, we came up with a scheme where we increased interest rates on deposits made by women to 7.5 per cent,” she mentioned. She further stated that property registration in the name of women has tax concessions, and under Poshan Scheme, nutritional needs of pregnant women and lactating mothers are being met. “Under PM Awas Yojana, registration of pucca houses is done either in the name of a woman or jointly with that of a male member,” the minister highlighted.
