It is important to encourage investment in India: IMF Chief Gita Gopinath

Chief Economist of the International Monetary Fund or IMF Gita Gopinath said India needs a lot of investment and it is important to encourage it. She was referring to the government's cold-shoulder to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos during his visit last week.

Jeff Bezos promised to invest $1 billion in India during a three-day visit to India. However, he didn't meet with any minister or government official during the visit.

Union Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal said Mr Bezos is doing "no great favours" to India with his investment. "They may have put in a billion dollars. But then if they make a loss of a billion dollars every year, then they jolly well have to finance that billion dollars. So it's not as if they are doing a great favor to India when they invest a billion dollars," the minister said while Mr Bezos was still in India.

Ms Gopinath of IMF commented on the row and said: ''India needs a lot of investment. It's important to encourage investment more broadly with the mandate of the country. We need to revive domestic investment in India, consumption spending is weak. So I think the environment has to be created for greater investment because that's what will raise the capital stock and raise India's potential growth. Given the size of the Indian economy in the global GDP right now, if you have a significant downward revision for India, then it does have an impact on global growth so we revised global growth down for 2019 by 0.1% and the vast majority of that comes from the downgrade for India.''

Congress leader P Chidambaram, in tweets this morning, commented that Gita Gopinath was one of the first to denounce demonetization and would now face attacks because of her remarks on the Indian economy. "I suppose we must prepare ourselves for an attack by government ministers on the IMF and Dr Gita Gopinath," tweeted the former finance minister after her comments came in that dissented from the BJP-led government.