World banking on India’s leadership: IMF chief

In a vote of confidence in India’s growth story, IMF chief Kristalina Georgieva underlined that the world is counting on India’s leadership of the G-20 and hoped that New Delhi can keep the world together amidst growing global instability.

“We count a lot on India’s leadership of the G-20. Because it is such a critical time for the world to protect its own well-being by protecting the integrated global economy. I hope that India will do that huge global service keeping us together,” she said. The international community counts a lot on India’s leadership of G-20, at a time when the world is faced with continued economic slowdown and social distress, she said. This year is going to be tougher on the global economy than the one we have left behind, Ms Georgieva warned.

Digital Power

Georgieva lauded India for embracing digitization. “What we see us working extremely well for India is how the country has taken digitization that was accelerated by COVID-19 to be a strong comparative advantage, both for public policy and for private sector growth,” the IMF Managing Director said in response to a question.

According to Georgieva, one of the priorities in the G-20 is how to make digitization built on a public platform, public infrastructure that allows everybody to plug in and significantly reduces costs of digitization; how that can be a source of growth and employment.

India has been a leader in digitalisation over the last few years and has overcome some of the administrative bottlenecks through increased innovation, a senior International Monetary Fund official said.

“As is well known by now, India has been a leader in digitalisation over the last couple of years, particularly with the provision of digital infrastructure… this has increased innovation and it has overcome some of the administrative bottlenecks that there were before,” she said.

India formally assumed the G20 (Group of 20) presidency on December 1. The next G20 Leaders’ Summit at the level of Heads of State/Government is scheduled to be held on September 9 and 10 in New Delhi.

The Group of Twenty (G-20) is an inter-governmental forum for international economic cooperation. It plays an important role on all major international economic issues and in shaping and strengthening global architecture.

(Shruti Saxena contributed inputs for this article)

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