India has stopped working in a routine, bureaucratic manner: PM in Thailand

India has stopped working in a routine, bureaucratic manner as the country is undergoing transformative changes, Prime Minister Narendra Modi told a group of influential business leaders while hard-selling his government's economic reform initiatives.

Inviting Thai business leaders to invest in India, the prime minister particularly talked about initiatives to reform India's tax regime and said his government is now starting face-less tax assessment so that there is no scope for discretion or harassment.

The Prime Minister was speaking at an event to mark golden jubilee of the Aditya Birla Group's presence in Thailand.

“In today's India, the contribution of the hard working tax payer is cherished. One area where we have done significant work is taxation. I am happy that India is one of the most people friendly tax regimes. We are committed to further improving it even more,” he said.

The prime minister said it was the best time to be in India and that many things such as foreign direct investment, ease of doing business, ease of living and productivity are rising while tax rates, red tapism, corruption, cronyism are on a decline.

“All of what I have said just now makes India one of the world's most attractive economies for investment. India received 286 billion US dollar FDI in the last five years. This is almost half of the total FDI in India in the last twenty years,” Modi said.

The prime minister also referred to India's dream to become a five trillion dollar economy.

“When my government took over in 2014, India's GDP was about 2 trillion dollars. In 65 years, 2 trillion. But in just 5 years, we increased it to nearly 3 trillion dollars,” he said.

The prime minister arrived here on a three-day visit on Saturday to attend ASEAN-India, the East Asia and the RCEP summits.