Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is leaving New Delhi on September 23
to take part in the two-day G-20 summit in Pittsburgh with a high-level delegation which includes Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission Montek Singh Ahluwalia,.
G-20, formed in 1999 in the wake of East Asia financial crisis, is a group, which is made up of 90 per cent of global GDP, 85 per cent of world trade and two-thirds of humanity. The G-20 summit in Pittsburgh comes five months after the Group met in London.
Buoyed by the successful firefighting at home with global financial crisis, Prime Minister Singh will have much to prescribe and advise for the developed countries, which are still in the stranglehold of economic meltdown. The economic crisis has hurt India as well. Its growth rate had sunk from 8-9 per cent to 5-6 per cent.
The Prime Minister will also have the occasion of meeting US President Barack Obama ahead of his visit to the US in November.
At the G-20 meeting, he would advocate reforms of the international financial institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to keep pace with the ground realities of the changing world .India is demanding from the developed world to increase its vote share in the World Bank and the IMF respectively. Last year, the IMF proposed raising India’s quota and vote share, which would push its position up to 11th among the 184 member nations.
In fact, the BRIC nations-Brazil, Russia, India and China-are together increasing the pressure on the developed world to reform and take a common position on the increase of vote share in the international financial institutions, which presently gives sweeping powers to the US.
Dr. Singh, who has been an ardent advocate of democratization of international financial institutions, is likely to be more vociferous this time.
India is also going to make strong objections to protectionism in all its forms covering trade and goods and services and investment. Introduction of tax cuts on the outsourcing by the Obama administration, which has hit India’s BPO sector hard, is also likely to crop up when India will present its point of view in the plenary session.
Climate change is expected to remain another hot topic of debate in G-20, which is seen as precursor to the much talked Copenhagen Summit on climate change slated to take place in December this year. Some even say that climate change may hijack the G-20 Summit. India will be demanding technology and monetary support from the developed countries to tackle climate change. In a significant shift in its stand ahead of the Copenhagen meeting, India has, for the first time, said reduction of its greenhouse emissions is as much a part of its climate change strategy as adaptation efforts and that it is even ready to quantify the emission cuts it is prepared to take over a period of time. The quantification – a big no-no until now – would, however, be only inductive, not absolute. Sources say the Manmohan Sigh Government is even ready with a draft legislation to suggest “broadly indicative” pathway that it would like to take on carbon emissions.
Coming back to the global economy, economists believe, the emergence of a more representative group of world leaders, G-20 which has largely overshadowed G-8, is no doubt a welcome development. It will become a major steering group for global economic cooperation in the coming years. In addition to evaluating progress in addressing the current global financial crisis, it must look ahead and begin to prepare for the “crisis next time” by strengthening institutional arrangements for collective action.
