"India's continuous wide-ranging reforms make the country an attractive destination for foreign investments, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said on Friday while addressing executives of top US companies," Economic Times (ET). "Continued macro-economic stability and resilience in economic recovery in recent months, focus on infrastructure-led economic growth and multi-sectoral opportunities for investors are some of the key highlights shared by the Finance Minister (FM)." "The Union government has sought to bring substantive changes in the way e-commerce platforms, such as Amazon and Flipkart, operate," proposing, "greater scrutiny of flash sales, enhanced liability of e-commerce sites, data protection for consumers and stronger grievance redressal," Hindustan Times (HT). "The rules are driven more by the desire to shield traditional brick-and-mortar stores, and handicap e-commerce firms, especially the foreign ones," wrote Ishan Bakshi. This is totally unfair because foreign firms are not allowed to hold inventory where they can exercise quality control but are forced to operate as marketplaces where they connect buyers and sellers without any knowledge of what the seller is sending by courier. They have to reveal country of origin of goods they sell and try to promote Indian products. "According to data released by China's Customs, India's exports to China reached USD 14.724 billion up 69.6 percent year on year in the first six months and India's imports from China amounted to USD 42.755 billion, up 60.4 percent," ET. India exported 20.28 tonnes of iron ore while we imported 26,000 ventilators and oxygen generators, more than 15,000 monitors, and nearly 3,800 tonnes of medical materials and drugs. We sell raw materials and Chinese products, being cheaper, keep inflation down. "An interesting -- and dangerous -- allegation going around is that foreign e-commerce marketplaces indulge in capital dumping," wrote Raghava Rao, Vice-President, Finance, Amazon India. Amazon has invested $6.5 billion while Walmart has invested $16 billion and "each has annual losses of around $1 billion". The FM is lecturing American companies to invest in India while penalising those that have already put in vast sums of money. India received $32 billion in foreign direct investment (FDI) in the first five months, January to May, 2021 and was the third largest recipient of foreign portfolio investment (FPI), ET. Market value of equities held by FPIs is at $592 billion and stock market indices are soaring. "In fact, India's m-cap (market capitalisation) rose 66 percent in the last one year to $3.02 trillion in June, outpacing the 44 percent growth in global m-cap." "The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has barred MasterCard from acquiring new customers (debit, credit or prepaid) from July 22 for not complying with data localisation requirements," BuisnessLine. "The data center market has heavy concentration in five markets: Northern Virginia, Singapore, London, Sidney and Silicon Valley," wrote Andy Mukherjee. "Decisions on where to set up shop are taken on the basis of reliable 24x7 power, fiber connectivity and cloud availability from the three main providers -- Amazon, Microsoft Corp and Alphabet Inc's Google." Will India be able to supply uninterrupted power for servers? In 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi called for 'Make in India', but "Modi's manufacturing push never went much further than gaming the World Bank's indicator's. No investor believes structural reforms, particularly to the legal system, have gone deep enough. India has a large workforce but too few skilled workers. To top it all off, the rupee is overvalued," wrote Mihir Sharma. Meanwhile, "A French court has permitted Cairn Energy to freeze several India-owned assets in Paris towards settlement of the international arbitration order, the Financial Times reported," ET. "India's first chief statistician Pronab Sen on Friday said that there is a need for the government to decrease control over the statistical system as statistics today has been politicised," My Droll. "Come and invest without knowing real figures and we will change rules suddenly, if we feel like it." Not a warm welcome, is it?
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