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The Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) Joint Secretary Manmeet K Nanda has said that the commerce and industry ministry is hopeful of improvement in foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows in the coming months despite global headwinds. According to the DPIIT data, FDI equity inflows into India contracted by 14 per cent to $26.9 billion during the April-September this fiscal. The total FDI inflows (which includes equity inflows, re-invested earnings and other capital) too declined to $39 billion during the first six months of the current fiscal against $42.86 billion in the year-ago period.

She said that usually investments and equity inflows improve towards the last quarter of a financial year. She also said that foreign inflows have a lot of effect because of the global slowdown that ‘we are seeing for the last 18 months...But we are hopeful, India has shown very great numbers compared to rest of the countries...So, we are hoping that we would be making up for all that would have been a drop by’.

Talking about the national single window system (NSWS), Nanda said that about 75,600 approvals were granted so far through this system out of over 1,23,000 applications received. NSWS was soft-launched to all stakeholders and the public in September 2021 to provide a single platform to enable the identification and obtaining of approvals and clearances needed by investors, entrepreneurs, and businesses in India. Out of 75,600 approvals, 57,850 approvals have been approved by the commerce ministry. So far, 27 central ministries and departments have been onboarded on the system, besides 19 states and UTs.

On the number of pending FDI proposals particularly from China under Press Note 3 (PN3) of 2020, she said ‘pendency is probably the lowest at this point in time’. Under that press note, the government had made its prior approval mandatory for foreign investments from countries that share a land border with India to curb opportunistic takeovers of domestic firms following the COVID-19 pandemic. She said ‘there is a mechanism through which all these proposals are viewed at. There is an inter-ministerial committee that looks at it...’.