Mumbai: Pitching for relaxing “administrative controls” to improve ease of doing business, top industry leader Deepak Parekh said impatience has begun creeping in among businessmen as nothing has changed on ground in first nine months of the Narendra Modi government.
He said the industry is still optimistic about the changes it expects from the Modi government, but optimism is not translating into revenues and there has been little improvement on ‘ease of doing business’ so far.
Parekh, who is known as a guiding voice of the Indian industry and has been on a number of key government panels on various policy and reform matters, further said ‘Make in India’ can’t succeed unless it is made easier for people to do business here and the decisions are fast-tracked.Â
“I think there is still a lot of optimism among people of the country and among the industrialists and entrepreneurs that the Modi government will be good for business, for progress, for reducing corruption. They think this government means business on all these fronts.
“However, after nine months, there is a little bit of impatience creeping in as to why no changes are happening and why this is taking so long having an effect on ground. Optimism is there but it is not translating into revenues. Any industry you see, when there is a lot of optimism, growth should be faster,” Parekh said.
Parekh, an eminent banker and Chairman of financial services giant HDFC, has always been very vocal with his views on reform and policy measures taken by various governments over three decades.
He was among the first industry leaders to openly criticise the previous UPA Government for “policy paralysis” after a spate of scams led to decisions getting delayed within the government and business began getting hurt.
“The thing is that our Prime Minister had a lucky period in these nine months. World commodity prices are at all-time low which help India most,” Parekh said. Stating that India is again at a position when everyone is looking at it with high hopes, he said, “I don’t see ease of doing business changing so far.”
Parekh cited the example of delay faced by his own group’s HDFC Bank with regard to approvals for raising of funds, including from overseas.
“Things are happening at such a speed around the world, we need to move faster as well. Just to give you an example, we needed to raise some capital in HDFC Bank. It took more time this time than earlier years to get approvals from Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB) etc,” Parekh said.Â