By IANS
New Delhi : Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said here Monday India can sustain a growth of nine to 10 percent because its enterprise has been unleashed and because it is increasingly a country of young people.
Inaugurating the Fortune Global Forum, which brings together the world’s top industry leaders and is being held in India for the first time, the prime minister said: “Acceleration of economic growth over the past two decades has been driven by rising investment and savings rates and by rising domestic consumption. I believe this can be sustained in the foreseeable future for two important reasons.
“First, we have witnessed an unleashing of Indian enterprise in this past decade. Big corporates have gone global. Small and medium enterprises have become more competitive. A new generation of local enterprise has burst forth onto the business stage.”
The second reason for the prime minister’s confidence in sustaining the growth rate was that “a demographic transition is now underway in India. We are increasingly a country of young people.”
“For many decades to come, India will be one of the important contributors to the available global workforce. However, to benefit from this … we need to invest in our people, in their education and skill building.
Inviting assembled industry leaders to invest in India, the prime minister said: “Our growth process is based on a widening and deepening of our own domestic market. As the Indian market grows, it is creating new opportunities for businesses across the world.”
Singh also said that the government had “increased public investment in agriculture, rural development and infrastructure” while working to remove regional disparities.
Admitting the need to “ease the bottlenecks constraining growth”, the prime minister felt India needed “two more decades of sustained effort and work if we are to get rid of chronic poverty, ignorance and disease which have afflicted millions of our countrymen for centuries”.
Singh said that India was seeking “a wider engagement with the outside world, as an open market and as an open society… We do want to be more integrated with the global economy. This is the best way to expand our development possibilities… At the same time, we seek a more equitable world order”.