Modi serves the India dream at breakfast with top world CEOs
One-on-ones with 6 CEOs, meeting with Clintons on last day in New York
WASHINGTON: Some of t he world’s most powerful business leaders streamed in and out of a Manhattan hotel Monday morning to hear a man re-sell them an investment destination given up for dead lately.
The man they met was Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
“India is open-minded. We want change. Change that is not one-sided,” Modi told them, according to a tweet from Syed Akbaruddin, spokesperson in the ministry of external affairs.
The PM started with a breakfast meeting with 11 business leaders, including Google’s Eric Schmidt, Pepsico’s Indra Nooyi and phar ma major Merck’s Kenneth C Frazier. Six got one-on-ones with him — Goldman Sachs’s Lloyd Blankfein, Boeing’s James McNer ney, IBM’s Virginia Rometty, General Electric’s (GE) Jeff Immelt, Blackrock’s Laurence D Fink and KKR’s Henry Kravis.
The list, analysts said, reflected best Modi’s plan to get investors back to India and to invest in manufacturing, in line with Make in India, an initiative he launched a day before leaving for the US.
“The mood at the meetings was very positive and forwardlooking,” said a source, adding, “there was none of the negativity that had impeded investments recently.”
Schmidt spoke about Google’s Digital India initiatives.
Some of the CEOs did have some concerns. For instance, Andres Gluski of AES, a power group, spoke about a recent Supreme Court ruling on coal mines. Though every one of the 17 business leaders Modi met were important, and many of them already invested in India massively, the composition of the list reflected his priorities.
The big investment banks that move much of the money around the world — Goldman Sachs, Blackrock and KKR all got one-on-ones with the PM. And so did some of the big manufacturing companies such as GE, which has been present in India since 1902, and Boeing, which has investments in the pipeline.
IBM, one of the world’s largest services company that has a massive presence in India, also got a one-on-one, which could be in keeping with its role in the outsourcing industry. IBM aslo bears an outsized influence on the ongoing immigration debate and plans to curtail the number of high-tech workers from India employed by Indian IT firms here.
The PM’s other engagement on Monday was a meeting with former US president Bill Clinton and his wife and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton. He was accompanied by external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj.