While smaller players in this part of the country voiced concern about FDI in retail, Mr B. Muthuraman, President, Confederation of Indian Industry, hailed the Government's decision on getting such investments into the country.
“It is a good move and the CII welcomes it,” he told Business Line , after inaugurating the new CII office in the city at Elysium Central.
He said the investment would do good for the overall economy of the country, trigger job creation and so on.
To a query on inflation, he said, “it can't bring inflation under control, but wish it drops.”
Earlier, addressing CII members he said the time has come for the industry body to play a larger role than merely helping the industry by contributing to the country's growth.
He said that at the National Council meeting of CII, slated for mid-December in Jaipur, a session has been proposed for rethinking CII's role. “I would like to see CII play a much larger role. The industry body is meant for a larger purpose. We need to do more than the advocating role, towards the growth and development of this country,” he said and urged the members to give it some thought
“Helping India to grow has several dimensions,” he continued and said that this could be achieved by participating and contributing to the several initiatives be it weeding out corruption or bringing the downtrodden into the mainstream of action (including affirmative action), upskilling people for jobs that get created in the country, governance aspect, reforms aspect including those in which the industry might not be directly connected and so on.
Conceding that the CII played different roles at different points of time, he said: “The Government today attaches importance to the inputs given by the industry body. However, over the last decade or so, CII had taken up societal role as well by initiating skill development programmes and the like.”
CII incidentally has quite a few offices of its own in the country.
In the current year alone, Mr Muthuraman said that he had the privilege of inaugurating two new offices – at Ahmedabad, about four-five months ago and the Coimbatore office today.