NSE Chief Woos China's Financial Institutions, Stock Exchanges

Beijing: As China looks to step up its investments in India after President Xi Jinping's first visit, India is wooing major Chinese financial institutions like the sovereign wealth funds, which can potentially invest billions of dollars in the lucrative Indian stock market.

"If you look at the Asia story, economies like India are definitely a significant piece of economic growth in this entire sub-continent. It makes a lot of rational sense for them to think about India," Chitra Ramakrishna, MD and CEO of the National Stock Exchange (NSE), said making a case for Chinese firms to begin investing in Indian stock markets.

A lot of bilateral discussions have taken place between the two countries in this regard, she said.

One of the bilateral meetings she had was with the Shenzhen stock exchange president and CEO Liping Song.

"We are working with the Chinese specifically to see if there are any road blocks. Prima-facie the whole foreign institutional framework in India is very welcoming," Ms Chitra told PTI in an interview.

Ms Chitra was here on a visit to attend a key conference in which she spoke on the 'role of stock exchanges in China's financial reform'.

She was replying to a question on whether China is getting interested to explore opportunities to allow big sovereign wealth funds like the China Investment Corporation (CIC) which is sitting on a corpus of over $650 billion to invest in India.

"It is beginning to happen especially with high-level dialogue between the two countries. The high-level dialogue always triggers more broad based interest in countries. This will start to happen," she said, replying to a question about prospects of Chinese investments in Indian stock markets which showed signs of bouncing back in recent months.

During the just concluded visit of Xi to India, China has committed to invest $20 billion in two industrial parks as well as in the modernisation of Indian Railways.

"In terms of India's growth story and the new set of economic growth parameters set out by the new government, the appetite for new investment is tremendous," she said.

"The kind of returns the Indian markets can offer is always on the upper quartile compared to most destinations in Asia. So it is a good diversification for Chinese investments to think about investments in India," she said.