ET GBS: Compare India with the best countries, not where the country was last year, says GE's John Rice

NEW DELHI: General Electric sees India as a country that is open for doing business and has generated global optimism, but more needs to done to ease processes that can at times be intimidating, the US conglomerate’s vice chairman John Rice has said.

Speaking at the opening session of the ET Global Business Summit on Friday, Rice said India had a lot of “favourable tailwinds” and plenty of capital was waiting to be invested in the country. GE itself — which has recently won big orders — sees investment opportunities in the country, the vice-chairman said. “From our perspective – the company that has been around for 100 years – India is open to business.

But it’s not like there isn’t more work to do,” Rice told a gathering of top executives, bureaucrats and industrialists. “The cost of doing business here are still intimidating at times. Taxes, paperwork, permitting processes, all of that can be improved and we know that the governments are working to improve it,” he added.

“My point is that there is work still to be done and we can’t compare ourselves with where India was yesterday, last year, or the year before. The benchmarks are global. So when we think about the cost of doing business, we have to compare ourselves with the best countries out there,” Rice said. “The real benchmark is can we do it faster than everybody else.” He said the governments at the federal and state levels are “ready to do it”.

There is optimism about India globally, Rice said. “In Davos last week, there was little bit of pessimism but there was lot of optimism about India. And there are questions, ‘could India be as good as it looked from the outside?’ My answer is ‘yes’.”