Modi Warns Global Investors Of Weaponised Trade, Pitches India As A Steady Partner

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi told an international business audience on Tuesday that supply chains, energy, minerals, payment systems and technology were increasingly being used as instruments of pressure and dominance, and presented India as a dependable partner in a fractured world

Representational Image Source: @MikeBloomberg on X

The routes created by globalisation over past decades had in many cases become chokepoints, he said, addressing the Bloomberg New Economy Forum, which is reportedly being held in India for the first time. He named no country.

The world had absorbed a pandemic, regional wars and disruptions to trade, critical minerals and energy in six years, Modi said, and was left with a question of trust: whether supplies would continue in a crisis, whether promises would be kept, whether a partner would stand by another country when it mattered.

He built the address around a phrase he repeated throughout, “power to empower”, arguing that the test of technology, data and knowledge in this decade is not who holds them but whether they are used to enable others. 

“We do not grow at anyone’s cost. We grow with the world and for the world,” he said, according to the government’s official rendering of the speech.

For the investors in the room he offered figures. Growth was 7.8 per cent in the April-June quarter. The current account deficit, more than four per cent of GDP twelve or thirteen years ago, stood at 0.61 per cent last year. Foreign exchange reserves exceed 700 billion dollars, and the banking system, he said, is in its strongest position in decades. Sovereign ratings are being upgraded.

He listed the reforms behind that: the goods and services tax, which replaced a patchwork of levies with a national market; a new insolvency law; the consolidation of 29 labour laws into four codes; and the decriminalisation of hundreds of minor business offences. “For us, reforms are not a compulsion. Reforms are our conviction,” he said.

Modi said India had met its Paris commitment to draw 40 per cent of installed electricity capacity from non-fossil sources in November 2021, nine years early and ahead of any other G20 country. Renewable capacity has risen from about 75 gigawatts in 2014 to roughly 300 gigawatts. Two rooftop and farm solar schemes have added more than 30 gigawatts and are expected to cut carbon emissions by over 30 million tonnes a year.

He said 250 million people had been lifted out of poverty over the past decade, and that direct transfers into bank accounts had cut corruption out of welfare delivery. India now has more than 250,000 startups, against a few hundred before 2014; nearly half are based in smaller cities and more than 45 per cent have at least one woman director or partner.

Much of the speech was a pitch for India as a supplier of public goods. One in five generic medicines sold worldwide comes from India, he said; the country shares its digital public infrastructure with the Global South, made its pandemic vaccination platform open source, supplied vaccines to more than 100 countries, and hosts over 2,000 global capability centres serving international firms. He listed the International Solar Alliance, the disaster resilience coalition, the Global Biofuel Alliance, the Big Cat Alliance, the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor and Mission LiFE as platforms India had created for shared benefit.

India gave the world the concept of zero and never asked for royalties, he said, and works in the same spirit now.