Slow but sure progress in India

published 22 May 2015

India's Sensex index, after hitting a new record last year, has gone off the boil. Foreign equity inflows have hit their lowest point since August 2013. What's gone wrong? "Capital is like a dog," one fund manager told James Crabtree and David Keohane in the Financial Times. "It goes to where it is best treated." The government's recent surprise decision to raise $6.4bn dollars in tax from global fund managers has prompted fury and legal challenges.

But the bigger problem is the new government under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who was elected a year ago this week. He was heralded as a great reformer, but progress has been slower than investors had hoped.Yet the big picture remains encouraging.

A series of laws raising the limits on foreign direct investment (FDI) in sectors ranging from defence to insurance and pensions has left India with "one of the most open FDI regimes in the emerging world", says Crabtree. The government has ditched costly diesel subsidies, plans to boost investment in infrastructure, and has pushed states to liberalise labour laws.

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One key change is a nationwide general sales tax (the equivalent of VAT) to replace the messy patchwork of state levies. This would usher in a genuine single market. Opposition in the upper house may delay its arrival beyond April next year, however.

The government will also auction all mineral rights to stop them going to politically connected firms.A new law will open the coal sector to competition, eventually ending Coal India's monopoly and helping to end electricity shortages. Modi's approach, says Niharika Mandhana in The Wall Street Journal, can be summed up as fixing the plumbing before building a new house.

The government now plans a new bankruptcy law and has promised to resolve the tax dispute with investors, which may in fact have been down to a bureaucratic error it seems the finance ministry failed to notice that its officials planned to implement it.

In sum, "things are getting better" under Modi, "even if we all wish he'd [implement reforms] even more quickly", says Bejoy Das Gupta of the Institute of International Finance. Lower oil prices, along with India's sound demographics and a strong presence in global services, complete the picture.Our favourite India play, Aberdeen's New India Investment Trust (LSE: NII), trades on a 9% discount to its net asset value.

Andrew is the editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He grew up in Vienna and studied at the University of St Andrews, where he gained a first-class MA in geography & international relations.

After graduating he began to contribute to the foreign page of The Week and soon afterwards joined MoneyWeek at its inception in October 2000. He helped Merryn Somerset Webb establish it as Britain’s best-selling financial magazine, contributing to every section of the publication and specialising in macroeconomics and stockmarkets, before going part-time.

His freelance projects have included a 2009 relaunch of The Pharma Letter, where he covered corporate news and political developments in the German pharmaceuticals market for two years, and a multiyear stint as deputy editor of the Barclays account at Redwood, a marketing agency.

Andrew has been editing MoneyWeek since 2018, and continues to specialise in investment and news in German-speaking countries owing to his fluent command of the language.