The Planning Commission expressed its desire that India should set up a sovereign wealth fund with an initial corpus of $10 billion, mainly to invest in energy and mining assets overseas, reports said, quoting Deputy Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia
He said “Sovereign Wealth Fund is something that the Finance Ministry is looking at. We have suggested to start with $10 billion.”
Sovereign Wealth Fund is a government-owned corpus where money is pooled in from state resources to invest in overseas assets. India has been mulling to set up its own fund to acquire strategic overseas assets in mining and energy segments to meet its future needs.
Countries like China and Singapore already set up their sovereign wealth funds. Even China has acquired significant asset in foreign land through investment from its $400 billion fund in the recent past.
Referring to GDP growth, he said the growth could be around 8 percent this fiscal. But in the first-quarter, it was below that. To achieve 8 percent, the growth had to accelerate in the second half of the year.
Source: RTT News