At the ET Awards 2013 function, held on December 7, 2013, Deepak Parekh, Chairman, HDFC took part in a panel discussion on ‘Rebooting India – 2014 & beyond’. We take a look at what he had to say on the issue of doing business in India & the need to boost manufacturing sector.

If you see the contribution of industry as a component of GDP, it is only 19%. China has almost double that. So India cannot continue to be a service led economy.

We need manufacturing, we need mining which is part of industry and this is one sector that has not grown. In fact in the static core, it has a negative growth. You will see good growth in agriculture. Services are continuing to grow, may not be in double digits but at good 8% or so.

So we need to stress — what has gone wrong is manufacturing. All our industrialists want to put plants abroad and they do not want to invest in India. Why is this happening? Because it is difficult to do business in India, it is difficult to get licences in India, the multiplicity of permissions that you require.

Take a residential project in Bombay. A housing complex in Bombay requires 50 approvals. How do we solve this logjam? We want more development, we want more growth.

Take the ease of doing business index. World Bank comes out every year with the ease of doing business. We have the distinction of being 134 out of 137. Even Transparency International, the corruption index, we are 94 out of 137.

We have to improve our position, simplify our procedures. In India, we do not know what is black and white, everything is grey. We must have more clarity for both Indian entrepreneurs and foreigners to come into India.