Obama gets back to biz

After geopolitics, Obama to address Indian CEOs today

With the US and India looking to boost bilateral trade, US President Barack Obama and Prime minister Narendra Modi will address businessmen from India and the US on Monday in two separate forums — India-US CEO Forum and US-India Business Summit.

Indian industry is also hopeful that the visit of US President Barack Obama will boost the ‘Make-in-India’ endeavour of the Modi government and give a leg up to India’s overall image in the global investment community leading to further funds flow into the country.

However, exporters including IT industry and the pharma is expecting that the controversial issue of visa res-trictions and problems faced with the US Food and Drug Administration (USFDA) will also come up for discussion and some breakthrough is achieved during the President’s visit.

“Mr Obama’s visit should be taken as an opportunity to make them interested in investing more in Make-in-India programme, infrastruc- ture and the skill development,” D.S. Rawat secretary general, Assocham said. With manufacturing seeing a contraction in the last fiscal year for the first time in 25 years, the government is trying to revive it with campaigns like ‘Make-in-India’. “CII believes that enha-nced co-operation is poss-ible in areas such as defence, infrastructure, high tec-hnology, education, and energy,” said Chandrajit Banerjee, DG, CII.