Planning Commission wants India to set up $10-billion wealth fund
“Sovereign Wealth Fund is something that the finance ministry is looking at. We have suggested to start with $10 billion,” Planning Commission deputy chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia told reporters here on the sidelines of a Ficci event.
Sovereign Wealth Fund is a government-owned corpus where money is pooled in from state resources to invest in overseas assets to meet its future needs.
The RBI has agreed to allow $5 billion to be used from forex reserve while the rest will be pooled in from reserves of rich PSUs. The proposal has been forwarded to a group of ministers, he added. Ahluwalia didn’t give a timeframe for establishing the fund or how the government would capitalise it.
The proposed fund would help India finance overseas energy assets to feed its power plants. China has acquired significant assets in foreign land through investment from its $ 400-billion fund in the recent past.
Referring to the growth scenario for the current fiscal, Ahluwalia said that growth in the second half of the year would be crucial to attain 8% economic expansion in the current financial year.
“Growth could be around 8% for this fiscal. But, in the first quarter, it is below that. So to achieve 8%, the growth has to accelerate in the second half of the year,” he said.
Talking about the monetary policy announcement slated
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