LONDON- From Crisis to Crisis

Chairman of the Planning Commission obviously has a thankless job in the months ahead.
Policy directions are by no means going to be easy to formulate. For instance, while one of the objectives of the Fourth Plan is that foreign aid is to be reduced to half its present inflow by 1973-74, paradoxically enough India was last week sponsoring a seminar on foreign private investment at which the Deputy Prime Minister himself bemoaned that private foreign capital "is not coming in with the speed and quantum in which it should come". He, however, was at pains to point out that there was no contradiction between the Plan objective to reduce the future inflow and India's effort to attract foreign capital today. For, he said, no country in the world has developed without foreign capital either in the past or today. Foreign private capital was necessary because it "has an impact on the industrial development of the country which loans from Government to Government do not have". Morarji then set out the framework within which India would welcome foreign investment. On controls, licensing, type of partnership, taxation, etc. he said, the Government of India had an open mind, Whatever restrictions there were, were necessary in the national interest, because the main object of private capital investment in India was the development of the country. Of course, capital inflow depended on profitability, and in this India had a good record. The policy of allowing repatriation of profits as well as of capital invested in this country would continue, he added.