Chenoy: Sustainable finance is imperative
The City of London Corporation, along with the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI), has launched a report calling on policymakers to reduce investment barriers to supercharge India’s green finance sector.
The report titled ‘Untapped Potential: Supercharging Green Finance in India’ has been written with inputs from the UK-India Green Finance Working Group and looks at the opportunities and challenges for sustainable finance in India. It offers recommendations on how to drive the green finance sector forward.
The recommendations include reduction in structural barriers to investment, including the development of the rupee-denominated masala bond market; innovative financing mechanisms tailored to the Indian landscape; increased transparency; greater visibility of opportunities and funding gaps; greater government cooperation for building domestic support in the country; greater sharing of technical expertise among regulators; and targeted reforms and incentives, such as changes to the External Commercial Borrowing (ECB) guidelines by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) for issuers with ‘green’ track records.
FICCI Secretary General Dilip Chenoy welcomed the report and pointed out that sustainable finance is imperative for India to achieve low-carbon, inclusive and stable growth.
“India and UK have a long-standing relationship and both countries can mutually collaborate and proactively support initiatives on green growth and investment internationally to unlock the domestic and international flow of green capital,” he said on 7 Nov 2019.
The report is of “a very high quality” and has been launched at “the most opportune time”, added Hitendra Dave, India Chair, UK-India Green Finance Working Group, and Managing Director and Head of Global Banking and Markets, HSBC India.
The report “should act as an anchor and reference point as we move to the next stage of implementation, policy advocacy, and defining and executing more granular steps to scale up sustainable finance for India,” he said.
“India and UK are both witnessing a greater understanding of new opportunities created by the convergence of the economic and environmental priorities,” he added.
The UK is a leading global hub for green finance, home to many world-class institutions from all stages of the investment cycle, from project conception to delivery, said Catherine McGuinness, Policy Chair, City of London Corporation.
“India is a market with an incredible diversity of opportunity, and collaboration between our two countries gives us a chance to make a real difference to the climate change efforts,” she said.
McGuinness noted that the launch of this report is a “step towards supercharging relations between the UK and India”. fiinews.com
