Hyderabad: Emphasizing that women empowerment is crucial to a nation’s development, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on November 28 invited global entrepreneurs to come to India and highlighted that it provides an investment friendly environment where restrictions have been scrapped and archaic laws abolished.
“To my entrepreneur friends from across the globe, I would like to say, ‘Come, Make in India, Invest in India’, for India and for the world,” PM Modi said at the Global Entrepreneur Summit 2017 held in Hyderabad. “I invite each one of you to become a partner in India’s growth story. And once again assure you of our wholehearted support.”
“In Indian mythology, woman is an incarnation of Shakti – the Goddess of power. We believe women empowerment is crucial to our development,” Modi said.
The Prime Minister also pointed out Indian women’s contribution in space programs and political affairs. “Indian women continue to lead in different walks of life. Our space programs, including the Mars Orbiter Mission, have had immense contribution from women scientists
“We have constitutionally provided for not less than one third of women representation in rural and urban local bodies, ensuring women’s participation in grass-root level decision-making,” Modi stated.
Highlighting his government’s reforms, Modi said more than 70 million loans have been sanctioned to women entrepreneurs under the MUDRA scheme, which provide easy finance of upto one million rupees to entreprenuers. He also underlined that “Start-Up India” program is a comprehensive action plan to foster entrepreneurship and promote innovation, adding that it aims to minimize the regulatory burden and provide support to startups.
Modi stressed on his government’s role in containing the fiscal and current account deficits as well as curbing inflation. “Our foreign reserves have crossed USD 400 billion, and we continue to attract large foreign capital flows,” he said.
The prime minister said a new scheme, ‘Saubhagya’, will provide electricity connection to all the unelectrified families by December 2018, adding that a program to provide high-speed broadband Internet to all rural areas by March 2019 has also been launched.
Modi said the taxation system has been overhauled with the launch of GST, while the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code has been introduced to ensure timely resolution for stressed ventures.
“We have recently strengthened this further, preventing wilful defaulters from bidding for stressed assets,” he said. “Tough measures have been adopted to tackle the parallel economy, check tax evasion and control black money.”
Modi also commented on Aadhaar, the world’s largest biometric based digital database. He said Aadhaar covers over 1.15 billion people and digitally authenticates over 40 million transactions daily. “We now digitally provide monetary benefits of various government schemes to the beneficiaries through Direct Benefit Transfer using Aadhaar,” he added.
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