India Continues To Be Preferred Destination For Foreign Direct Investment: Goyal

Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal on Friday said India continues to be a preferred foreign direct investment destination despite soaring global interest rates.

He said that interest rates rose worldwide including in the U.S. and that led to the flow of capital back in the developed nations.

"That was a period where one would have imagined a much deeper impact on the developing economies than what India witnessed, but the strength of demand in India, the strength of opportunities that people saw in India, ensured that we did not see the drastic fall that many of our other peer countries (witnessed)," Goyal said.

The total FDI -- which includes equity inflows, reinvested earnings and other capital -- contracted 15.5% to $%32.9 billion during April-September this fiscal against $38.94 billion in April-June 2022.

"We continue to have significant FDI coming in...a lot of reinvestment of earnings happened even during this period when ideally I would have thought global balance sheets were very stressed," the minister said.

He added that India continues to see traction for investments and the country 'continues to see money coming in'.

"The material factor is that it (FDI) continues to come in. Very often when you see a very rapid growth on any statistic, you need some time for it to cool down also," he said.

A very continuous and rapid growth of money flow sometimes is 'very harmful' for an economy also, "so I think India has been able to create a very fine balance in our control of inflation," he added.

The minister was speaking at ET Now Global Business Summit 2024.