Piyush Goyal Assesses Invest India to Drive Make-in-India Agenda

By siliconindia | Wednesday, 14 May 2025, 03:05 Hrs

Piyush Goyal conducts review meeting at Bharat Mandapam, urging enhanced performance of Invest India to boost investments.
Focus on empowering MSMEs, enhancing manufacturing, and streamlining land allotment and clearance procedures for investors.
Invest India, key to the Make in India drive, is being refined to support the government’s goal of raising manufacturing's GDP share to 25% by 2025.

Minister of Commerce and Industry Piyush Goyal conducted a detailed review of Invest India during a meeting conducted at Bharat Mandapam here. The minister laid stress on improving the performance, effectiveness and efficiency of Invest India to promote more investments into India.

He also touched upon options for further enhancing investor participation, empowering MSMEs and improving manufacturing in the country. Invest India is the national investment facilitation and promotion agency of the Government of India and assists in facilitating approval for establishing manufacturing businesses by accelerating clearances needed, for example, those related to allotting land.

Invest India is the investor's first point of contact for overseas and domestic investors. It offers full-service, end-to-end support throughout the entire investment lifecycle from pre-investment facilitation and advisory to aftercare and expansion assistance with a particular focus on facilitating manufacturing through the Make in India program. India's manufacturing industry is a major sector of the Indian economy, accounting for approximately 17 per cent of the GDP and employing more than 27.3 million people.

The government plans to raise its portion to 25 per cent by 2025, spurred on by policies such as the 'Make in India' initiative and Production-Linked Incentive (PLI) schemes. The Commerce and Industry Minister would like to reduce Invest India processes further to promote more investments. His focus on MSMEs is part of the Government's plan to scale up these job-intensive businesses because they have maximum potential to generate employment in India.

In order to breathe new life into the manufacturing industry, the Make in India programme was initiated in September 2014 to develop innovation and make India a hub for manufacturing globally by enhancing domestic as well as foreign investment, establishing world-class manufacturing facilities, improving skill development, safeguarding intellectual property rights, and ease regulatory procedures to provide a facilitative environment for industries to flourish.

Because of continuous efforts from the government, between 2014-2023, Foreign Direct Investment equity inflow in the manufacturing sector rose by 55 per cent to $148.97 billion from $96 billion in the last nine years (2005-2014).

This success is because of the different policy measures undertaken by the government from time to time. In the current FDI policy, almost all sectors permit 100 per cent FDI, with the exception of some prohibited sectors. The defence sector permits 74 per cent FDI under the automatic route and 100 per cent under the government route. For the broadcasting sector, the limits of FDI are different, with a distinction between print and electronic media.

Although automatic route does not involve any approval of the Government of India for non-resident or Indian companies, the government route requires prior Government of India approval prior to investment.