Washington: The US has said that India remains a “challenging place” to do business and seeks to promote an attractive and credible investment climate by reducing bureaucratic barriers to investment. needed. The US State Department said in a report ‘2021 Investment Climate Statements: India’ released on Wednesday that India “remains a challenging place to do business” and includes the removal of special constitutional status from Jammu and Kashmir and citizenship. The passage of the Amendment Act (CAA) was also mentioned.
The new protectionist measures, including procurement rules limiting competitive options, increased tariffs, have affected global supply chains, the report said. Simultaneously, specific Indian standards, which do not match with international standards, have hampered the growth in bilateral trade.
In its report, the Ministry of External Affairs said that in the first 100 days of the second term of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government, two “controversial” decisions were taken – removing the special constitutional status from Jammu and Kashmir and passing the CAA. In this regard, India says that the CAA is its “internal matter” and “no foreign party has any right to comment on issues related to the sovereignty of India”.
India has clearly told the international community that abrogation of Article 370 is its internal matter. The Ministry of External Affairs further said that there was a decline in economic activity due to the containment measures of the Covid-19 epidemic, but by December 2020, economic activity started showing signs of positive growth. The report also said that the BJP-led government has recently faced some criticism for the rise in COVID-19 cases.
