India's domestic agenda will contribute significantly to global output: Suresh Prabhu

Prime Minister Narendra Modi's 'Sherpa' at the G-20 Summit Suresh Prabhu on Sunday said India's domestic initiatives like 'Make in India', financial inclusion, and infrastructure development will contribute significantly to the additional two %growth target committed to by G-20 leaders.

"We are actually working higher than that. Our contribution is significantly higher. Our domestic initiatives like Make in India, financial inclusion, getting infrastructure and facilities will contribute significantly to that," Prabhu said at a briefing here. "This is our domestic agenda which will in any case benefit our citizens and in the process, because we are contributing significantly to our own output, it will be calculated as a part of the global output anyway because we are part of the G-20 countries," he added.

In a significant move for Indian workers abroad, Prabhu, who is also India's Railway Minister, said bank charges will be brought down to 5 % from the previous 10 % on remittances sent back home by the workers. "There has been a fairly significant progress made in this meeting that remittances by our Indian workers who work in the Middle East mainly, who send the largest amount of money back home, almost $70 billion. No other country sends as much, and that was attracting bank charges of as high as 10 %. We have now agreed to bring it down to 5 %."

Earlier during his speech at the G-20 plenary session, Prime Minister Narendra Modi once again raised the issue of scourge of black money and sought for global co-ordination to deal with this issue. His step to raise the issue of black money at the G-20 plenary session made a huge impact and was taken on board.