'What Can Derail Us Is Only...': Industrialist Sunil Bharti Mittal On Indian Economy | WEF | Davos

Well, I think India is generally in a great spot. I mean, you already heard that it's a matter of numbers, mathematics. We will get there to be number three. And if I put a spiritual metaphor around it, I would say it's written in the stars. The question is 67 trillion dollars for 1.5 to 1.6 billion people doesn't stack up. So we will get to number three, but we need to get to 25 to 30 trillion. And we can quibble about the year in which we'll get there. But we have to get there and we will get there. What do we need? My tribe, the business community needs an enabling environment, need a committed government, needs stable situation in the country. All that is available now. One factor that is coming to challenge our growth that we are currently on is massive competition that has occurred in the world today. The US was a huge market for China to grow itself.

And they used 20, 30 years of that wonderful moment to build their factories, to build their manufacturing bases, go into deep tech, earn a tremendous amount of money to shore up the economy. That opportunity is not available for India. So we will have to find our own ways and means. Thankfully, we have a huge market. India is a continent of consumers, young people consuming more and more. We will be signing hopefully the EU trade deal very soon. The UK is done, Australia is done, New Zealand is done, the UAE is done, many more in the pipeline, but the big one with the US hopefully also gets done soon. We heard from Secretary Lutnik this morning. America must bring everything back to manufacturing in America. That's a change. We need to deal with that new shift in the global sort of trading norms that we'll have to deal with. Give us more backing from the government, give us more freedom. We have a prime minister who understands the power of business. He uses the industry and industry players to scale up the country, provide more employment. The PLI scheme that has come out. I never thought during my lifetime India will be a manufacturing destination for electronics or telecom equipment.

All that has changed in the last five, seven, eight years. Just in the last five, seven, eight years massive amount of exports of Apple phones and many other products are happening now. I remain very confident that the energy that I see in India and now I work in Europe, I work in France, I work in the UK and I can tell you we will continue to grow at a rapid clip of 6, 7, 8, hopefully in some years even higher, whereas the world will be settling at half a percent, 1% or minus in certain years. We have a good future for us. What can derail us is only the competitive intensity of the world play now that we need to deal with and that really lies in the hands of the able government how they definitely deal with the trade deals.

Well, I can say certainly nothing from France or the UK. It's much harder, much, much harder. Oh my god, oh my god, it's much harder and they also have the additional burden of the Brussels bureaucracy which they have to deal with. There are just multiple layers there. I would say the US is a good model where business is really highly encouraged and the ease of doing business I would say to a good level, and of course there are fine examples in Singapore and you know UAE, etc. But I would echo the honorable minister's point of view here. India has come a long way. I mean, I am a product of I started in '76. So I have seen...