SYDNEY: India ranked a dire 142 out of 189 countries in the World Bank’s global ease of doing business list, Modi has vowed to bring the country into the top 50 during his first term in office.
Since his May election, he has used ordinances to raise foreign direct investment from 26 per cent to 49 per cent in the defence and insurance sectors, promised a more consistent and business-friendly tax regime, flagged reforms to the restrictive land acquisitions act and an end to state-owned Coal India’s monopoly over coal mining.
AT wintry Delhi’s hottest new restaurant Town Hall this week the executive chef’s signature dish, Anticucho Australian lamb was flying off the menu.
It is both good news and bad for the Sydney-based Australian importer, Mulwarra, and Town Hall’s talented head chef, Augusto Cabrera.
Good news for Mulwarra, which has been selling Australian lamb into the notoriously difficult Indian market for almost three years, but potentially problematic for Cabrera, who faces an ongoing weekly battle to secure the meat from his Australian suppliers.
The former Oberoi hotel sushi chef already buys much of his charcuterie, salmon and lamb from Australian importers, and is looking to expand the range of products he sources from them.
But a free trade agreement between India and Australia — which both countries hope to conclude before the end of this year — is unlikely to ensure more consistent access to the products essential to his menu.
“At the moment supply is so unreliable that we have to source through several Australian suppliers,” Mr Cabrera told The Weekend Australian.
“If lamb is not available from one, then we get it from another supplier because we have to have it on our menu.”
The problem is not the Australian exporters but India’s clunky Customs service.
It is the bane of his business in India, admits Mulwarra’s business development executive, Rory O’Connor, who joined a 450-strong Australian trade delegation for Australian Business in India this week.
Mulwarra imports its high quality lamb, fish and charcuterie all over the world but India — potentially the world’s largest consumer market — represents a tiny 0.5 per cent slice of that pie.
“Getting product cleared through Customs once it arrives is the biggest problem we have. We only ship small amounts of frozen product into India because it can take up to 50 days to clear the airport,” says O’Connor.
Compare that with Singapore where a shipment can be in a buyer’s cold store within five hours of arrival on the docks.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has spent the first nine months of his five-year tenure selling India as a business destination to the world and promising to remove the byzantine red tape which has defeated so many investors and importers in the past.
This week his message was buoyed by new World Bank forecasts which suggest India will be the world’s only major economy to see consistent growth this year, on the back of falling oil prices and expectations of a friendlier foreign investment climate.
India’s apparent economic miracle stalled under the former Congress-led government — reaching a record 9 per cent GDP growth in 2007 only to almost halve by the time it was voted out of office last May.
It is music to the ears of big Australian players such as Rio Tinto, ANZ, Telstra and Woodside, all of which joined Trade Minister Andrew Robb’s business delegation this week and have been chipping away at the Indian market and its onerous domestic regulations, bylaws and protections for years.
