FM asks Singapore to invest in infra pipeline

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman made the appeal during a meet with Singapore’s senior minister and Coordinating Minister for Social Policies Tharman Shanmugaratnam when he called on her here on Tuesday.

She encouraged investors from Singapore to explore the newly launched National Infrastructure Pipeline and become partners to the big push that Government of India is envisaging for India’s infrastructure sector, said another tweet.

Sitharaman had last week unveiled a Rs 102 lakh crore National Infrastructure Pipeline to ramp up the economy to take it to $5 trillion in five years.

Both the ministers agreed to take forward the collaboration on Networked Trade Platform Initiative of Singapore and to intensify expert-level discussions on this issue and concretise the way forward.

Sitharaman also expressed satisfaction in the work of the Joint Working Group on Fintech set up between the two countries and encouraged the Working Group to look into the long-term opportunities which are destined to grow manifold with more digital platforms.

Shanmugaratnam extended Singapore’s support for India’s G20 Presidency in 2022 and expressed Singapore’s strong desire in partnering with India.

Shanmugaratnam had called on Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday. Modi and Shanmugaratnam expressed satisfaction at the rapid pace of bilateral relations. They discussed several matters of mutual interest in the sphere of economic cooperation, including infrastructure, skills, India-Singapore Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Agreement (CECA), anddigital economy.