PRESS RELEASE

BRICS Growth Policy: China To Invest $100 Billion in India Infrastructure?

Sept. 15, 2014 (EIRNS)—With Chinese President Xi Jinping starting a visit to India Sept. 17, media in both countries are full of outlines of what may be very large Chinese investments in India’s productivity and growth potential. The benchmark of Japan’s $35 billion in investments announced several weeks ago, is likely to be exceeded.

NDTV/Press Trust of India, in a significant report on the trip, forecast that China will be investing about $500 billion abroad in the next five years, and that a large portion will be invested in India. As much as $100-200 billion over that period may go into modernization of India’s railway system, two high-speed rail corridors, building of industrial parks, launching of large water-and-power power projects for interbasin river transfer.

The new rail infrastructure, according to NDTV and Press Trust of India, will be Bangalore-Mumbai and Bangalore-Chennai high-speed corridors.

"‘India has a strong, real desire to increase its cooperation with China and other countries to perfect and develop its rail system, and has concrete cooperation ideas,’ Assistant Chinese Foreign Minister Liu Jianchao told reporters. ‘India is considering building high-speed railways, and China has a positive attitude towards this.’"

There will also be cooperation between the countries on space and nuclear technology.

Economic Times adds that China will invest in creating industrial parks, to assemble up to 200 manufacturing companies in each case, in Gujurat and Maharashtra states; China already has developed 200 such parks. This is critical to developing Indian exports on a high-technology basis, and reducing India’s large trade deficit with China.

Meanwhile, China’s CCTV headlined an article "China and Russia Hitting New Heights" of economic investment. It says that trade will increase from $89 billion this year to $100 billion in 2015 and $200 billion in 2020. Russian Deputy Prime Minister Shuvalov, after a week in China, was interviewed on the "Vesti on Saturday" TV program, and said that the two countries discussed 32 industrial projects.

"And they cover absolutely everything: petrochemicals, the banking sector, work in the area of food products, and very, very varied projects. It isn’t just gold, oil, gas and copper that we discussed yesterday."

He said that they also discussed how China had handled sanctions, after Tiananmen in 1989, of the type now being used by the British empire and NATO to attack Russia.