Inside Trump's Meet With Industrialists At Davos: Mahindra CEO Anish Shah Tells Us What Transpired

It's a pleasure to be here in beautiful Davos. Nice blue skies, very calm and peaceful. We hope the world becomes like this as well as we go forward. With regard to your question for yesterday, it was clearly a privilege to be there. It was quite a group of CEOs. You could take the top 50 companies or the top 100 companies in the world and most of the CEOs were there, including Tim Cook and Jensen Huang and Satya Nadella and a bunch of others. It was a good conversation. The speech was a fairly good one with business, clearly not anywhere as close as fiery as the earlier one in the afternoon. But more than the speech it was the interaction after that and there were a few of us that did get a chance to shake hands with him and I had a brief dialogue with him on the Mahindra group as well, which was a good positive dialogue from our standpoint.

Just very friendly. I mentioned I was from the Mahindra group and he responded 'good group, very good group' and he clearly knew about us and said we need more like you. So it was a positive sign. We have been in the US for over 30 years now. We assemble tractors in the US. We have 500 dealers. So it's one that we're recognized for. We were also the first after 25 years to set up an automotive plant in Detroit for off-road vehicles. And it is good to see us being recognized in the US in some form. So it was overall a good experience. But more than this experience overall, Davos has in some ways regained its position as being the place where it's a platform for dialogues to happen. The spirit of dialogue is the theme for this year as well and hopefully find solutions for the world. There were many other smaller group meetings which included leaders from other countries as well and a number of others where business leaders were not part of. But this spirit of dialogue is one that places Davos back firmly on the map and one that we clearly hope that as I started, the world becomes as peaceful as the place around us today.

You get a sense that there is warmth between the two nations on a business platform. That is our sense and I am fairly optimistic that we shall get to some agreement. There's a long positive history across both countries and beyond that it is all about geopolitics which I must say I'm not as much of an expert on.

The Indian economy is in a very good shape right now and the actions that have been taken by the government over the past 12 months, more so the acceleration over the past 6 months, have really put the economy even stronger than what it was. We are seeing tremendous demand across automobile, tractors, resorts, for our logistics business, for our real estate business. As you know, we operate in 70% of GDP for India and we see the economy in very, very strong shape and I have gone on record saying that India will grow at 8% or 8 to 10% a year possibly for the next 20 years and we are seeing that happening at this point in time. So for us it is stay the course, continue to focus on capex on infrastructure building, focus on the long-term which the last few budgets have continued to maintain fiscal discipline and that's all that the economy needs at this point in time.