On Episode 986 of The Core Report, financial journalist Govindraj Ethiraj talks to Vivek Lohia, Managing Director of Jupiter Wagons. We also feature an excerpt from our recent Special Edition featuring Dr. Rajiv Kumar, former Vice Chairman of NITI Aayog and Chairman of Pahle India Foundation.

SHOW NOTES

(00:00) Stories of the Day

(00:50) UN General Assemby Meets In New York, Will It Provide The Path To Peace

Oil Prices Fall And Indian Markets Rise

(03:18) What Bernstein Does Not Like About Older Large Cap Indian Companies

(05:11) Coal Stocks Are Running Low

(07:24) The Western Dedicated Freight Corridor Is Fully Commissioned

(18:36) How India Can Step Up To Receive More Chinese Investments

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NOTE: This transcript contains the host's monologue and includes interview transcripts by a machine. Human eyes have gone through the script but there might still be errors in some of the text, so please refer to the audio in case you need to clarify any part. If you want to get in touch regarding any feedback, you can drop us a message on feedback@thecore.in.

Good morning, it's Tuesday, the 22nd of September and this is Govindraj Ethiraj, broadcasting and streaming weekdays from Mumbai, India's financial capital.

Our top stories and themes…

United Nations General Assembly meets in New York. Will it provide the paths to much-needed peace?

Oil prices fall and Indian markets rise.

What Bernstein does not like about older large-cap Indian companies?

Coal stocks are running low.

The western dedicated freight corridor is fully commissioned. What does that mean?

And how India could step up to receive more Chinese foreign direct investment and what it'll take?

Markets, UN General Assembly and Large Cap Indian Companies

The United Nations General Assembly or UNGA is meeting this week as they do every year in New York.

It's a great time to be in New York City because it also overlaps with the New York Climate Week amongst a string of other events, functions and gatherings with visitors from the world over. Since everyone is in town, hopefully some important meetings will take place. The theme of the 81st session of the General Assembly is Restoring Trust, Managing Transformation, a United Nations that delivers for all.

One surely hopes it will deliver for at least four parties, the United States, Iran, Russia and Ukraine. Because till they talk to each other and find a lasting solution, the world at large will continue to reel from economic shocks as we are right now. President Donald Trump, for instance, said he would be open to meeting Iranian President Massoud Pazeshkian, who is expected to be in New York this week for the Assembly, Reuters reported.

And then Russia and Ukraine have to talk too because one reason prices of diesel are shooting is because of refinery damage in Russia. So much so that on Sunday, US President Donald Trump asked Ukraine to stop hitting Russian diesel refineries, blaming the attacks for creating a diesel shortage that he said was hurting the world. Well, it's surely hurting the United States and prices are at record highs at the pump.

Meanwhile, oil prices have returned to the vicinity of $100 a barrel and their lowest in 11 days on Monday as investors and traders hoped for some diplomatic outcome in New York. Brent crude futures hit their lowest since September 10th on Monday with the Brent contract for November at $101 per barrel, according to Reuters. With all this in the background and bargain buying returning to the markets, the indices were up, the Sensex was up 564 points to 74,858 and the Nifty 50 was up 67 points to 23,414.

In the broader markets, the Nifty mid cap and small cap fell 0.29 and 0.07% so very marginally down. The rupee also was marginally stronger on Monday after moving in a narrow band thanks to those lower oil prices as well as some portfolio inflows, though the month of September so far has seen close to $3 billion of foreign portfolio investment outflows under $3 billion to be more specific. The rupee closed at Rs.

95.81 per dollar, which was up from its previous close of Rs. 95.87 per dollar. The Reuters currency report said that Asian currencies were mostly range bound while regional equities were up after oil prices fell, including of course in India.

Meanwhile, in a somewhat blunt note, global equity research and broking firm Bernstein has said that many of India's large cap companies represent a bygone economic era. Most companies, it said, are not investing in the future but consolidating their past, often expecting policy to continue shielding them from global competition. Business Standard quoted the brokerage saying, One reason India has struggled to scale in emerging technologies such as electric vehicles, semiconductors, and solar is the reluctance of companies with the deepest pockets to commit capital.

If large caps cannot provide the growth, foreign portfolio investors must gravitate towards smaller and mid-cap companies, but separating quality from noise and identifying future giants requires specialist teams, dedicated resources, and long investment horizons, according to Bernstein. They also feel that most small and mid-cap stocks remain subscale with low free floats, limited liquidity, and sparse coverage, not an ideal destination for large institutional capital. Hence, it says, that's the Bernstein note, foreign portfolio investors who've withdrawn nearly $40 billion from Indian equities in the last two years have little reason to invest in India, though they may return to trade in Indian equities rather than invest for the long term.

It says that with large caps struggling to reinvent themselves, incumbent business models facing disruption from new technologies, and small and mid-caps difficult to access at institutional scale, the case for a structural India allocation has become harder to make. Over the next 12 months, it says, foreign portfolio investment flows are likely to be flat to modestly positive despite two years of significant outflows. And this is based on, the note says, primarily on the easing of recent headwinds rather than any meaningful improvement in the structural factors that drive long-term foreign capital allocation.

Speaking of foreign portfolio investors, JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon is headed to India, where his firm is hosting an annual investment conference in Mumbai. We are scheduled to be there too, doing a bunch of interviews, so stay tuned for that.

Coal Stocks Are Running Low

Nearly 40% of India's coal-fired power plants are operating with critically low fuel stocks due to a surge in power demand amidst unusual weather linked to El Nino, Reuters quoted government data saying.

The number of power plants with critically low coal stocks of less than 25% of the required inventory are only able to generate power for less than three days was up to 74% as of Saturday from about 60 plants the week before, according to data from the Central Electricity Authority. India's peak power demand is between 230 and 250 gigawatts in the last week, though its peak peak power demand stood at 270 gigawatts in the month of May. A note from Crisil said, current levels remain broadly aligned with the average of 76 million tonnes recorded across August 24 and 25, that's coal.

This also indicates that despite the significant drawdown, coal availability is adequate and there is no material supply-side stress, Crisil said, adding that the key challenge has been the mismatch between rising demand and transportation capacity. Prolonged rains across the eastern coal belt have disrupted mining operations and hampered coal evacuation. During April to August, Crisil said, rake loading increased only about 5% and coal receipts 3%, even as coal consumption has jumped.

Consequently, incremental evacuation was insufficient to replenish inventories at power plants. To ease the situation, Coal India has permitted power plants with fuel supply agreements to lift additional coal by road alongside rail transport from the first week of this month.

A New Operational Freight Corridor

Three weeks ago, India's multi-billion dollar PM Gatishakti project, which is similar to the national multimodal freight grids in the United States, Europe and China, got a shot in the arm with the Western dedicated freight corridor coming into full operation. With this, India has completed a 2,843 kilometre dedicated freight trail backbone going from Dadri to JNPT and then the Eastern corridor from Ludhiana to Sonnagar. So the Western corridor connects the Northern manufacturing and consumption belt with a key container gateway that's the Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust just outside Mumbai.

One key feature of this corridor is its ability to run longer, heavier and double stack container trains, which substantially increases freight productivity. The freight corridor will benefit amongst others Calcutta headquartered Jupiter waggons, which makes and supplies railway waggons. Jupiter is also pushing aggressively into rail wheel and wheel set manufacturing following a recent partnership with Italian company Lucini RS.

I reached out to Vivek Lohia, managing director of Jupiter waggons and I began by asking him how he was seeing the impact of the DFC's commissioning Jupiter's own expansion plans and other freight trends in the context of railways.

INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT

Vivek Lohia: You know, Dedicated Freight Corridor means a lot not only to Jupiter, definitely, but to our nation, I think, in general, because Indian railway had been thirsty for investments. And you know, if you talk about the early '60s, '70s, railway was the biggest logistics carrier in the nation. And if you look at till the late '70s also, our railway network was much bigger than the Chinese in terms of size, and after North America, it was the biggest rail network.

Then we lost that race because, unfortunately, '80s, '90s, there was hardly any investment. Railway lost their share. And if you look at, you know, the government keeps on talking about reduction of the overall logistics costs. At around four to five years back, we were at close to 13 to 15 percent; I think the new current data which have come, we are at about eight-nine odd percent and it's coming down.

But you know, significantly, if you want to reduce and then bring down the targets to the three-four percent which the government has in mind, can only happen through railway, because railway per kilometre is by far, I would say, is close to about 60-odd percent cheaper than road. In terms of CO2 emissions, railway is at about 80 percent more efficient than road.

And more importantly, for energy security, because, you know, DFCC, as well as now close to 100% electrification, which is a gain, I think it's a very, very significant achievement which railways achieved. So here, you guarantee energy security; you're not dependent on fossil fuel, which we need to import, because earlier, especially when it comes to the freight, diesel was one of the primary inputs which went into the engines.

And with DFCC, now you're talking about trains running at close to 120 kilometres an hour, axle loads increasing from 22 tonne to 25 tonne. Three days back, I was with the DFCC chairman, and you know, the first thing he asked—that DFCC, the advantage is that they have now a high mast, so to help double-stacking of container trains.

Yeah, the wires are running much higher than the normal, much higher. The envelope which is available is much bigger than if you look at a normal track. This first question to me: "Why aren't you designing more cars? You know, how do I help you, or how do we work to a solution where we can design other cars to make maximum use of the envelope?"

So it is a game changer where, you know, suddenly you have so much more opportunities available because of the Gati Shakti policy and the Gati Shakti terminals. There is so much more private participation which is happening. But beyond that, I think India needs many, many more DFCCs. It is a great achievement.

Another important fact is that today, DFCC is, you know, at its nascent stage, also running close to 100% capacity; in some sectors, beyond 100%. So it clearly demonstrates that we need significant more capacities which are there. And more importantly, the feeder routes. One of the challenges with DFCC is that, you know, on DFCC—it's typically with Indian all Indian highways: on the highways, you're running at very high speeds, but once you exit on the feeder routes, again you're back to that same challenges.

I think DFCC, combined with now the other policy initiatives which railway has taken, it would be a game changer for the sector. And railway has a very clear policy: the National Rail Plan. If you look by 2040, they are talking about at least 40 percent minimum of the overall share of the logistics pie which railway should have; it is at least an additional 500 million tonnes of additional cargo which they're going to load every year. So it is significant.

Govindraj Ethiraj: Right. And one of the things that Jupiter is doing is expanding on wheel and axles. So tell us about how you are scaling up, and what is the kind of market that you see both on the government as well as the private side? I know you've been also getting some a fairly sort of continuous flow of orders.

Vivek Lohia: We started this company way back in 2006. You know, at that time, the wagons, when we were manufacturing, about 80 percent of what went into a freight car was bought out for us; it was all outsourced. And at that time, it was very clear, and we realised that if you want to stay in this business for long term, we need to integrate, and we need to integrate at a scale. Because otherwise, as the industry keeps on growing, there will be more competition coming in, and it will not be possible for you to remain competitive. And that has also happened with a lot of our peers, that they have become uncompetitive over the last decade or so.

So we were very clear in our strategy. So we did that by doing backward integration, by bringing in much more technology. Where we could not have our own technology, we made alliances, we made partnerships with the best companies in the world, and that is how we have... And so wheel and axle is also a very important part of it.

As you may be aware that India still imports about close to 50 percent of its wheel and axle requirement, and mainly comes out of China. You know, we have faced a lot of challenges over the past four-five years where, because of wheel and axle, we have had constraints on our production capacities. So this is something which I felt there is a huge need for it.

In Aurangabad, we acquired—Bonatrans had a machining facility which was there. Bonatrans is one of the leading producers of wheels in the world, so we acquired the machining facility in Aurangabad, which was a start. And now we are setting up a complete greenfield project in Odisha, where they are investing close to three thousand-odd crores. We are going to produce about a hundred thousand wheels and axle—and forged wheels and axles.

India mainly today produces mainly cast, which is a more outdated technology, which is not relevant for any high-speed or semi-high-speed applications. Interesting fact is that when it comes to entire passenger mobility in India, especially metro, semi-high-speed, all our wheelsets are imported. India doesn't have any capacity to produce anything in the country, which we want to change.

And to again, you know, to kick-start it, we've got in a company called Lucchini, which they are the biggest producers of wheelsets today in Europe and in the world. They are the most advanced company when it comes to semi-high-speed and high-speed wheelsets. Even the Chinese high-speed trains, the wheelsets are supplied by Lucchini; they have a joint venture in China through which they do it.

So we have had Lucchini taking 15 percent equity in this company, and the Italian government has taken 10 percent equity. So the whole idea was that they bring in the technology, the designs; we create the manufacturing base which can compete with China, and this way both of us become relevant.

So the whole focus is that we are definitely looking at the Indian market for our own—for Jupiter's own self-consumption, for the Indian semi-high-speed market, for the metro business. And to a large extent, we are looking at the export market, I think, for that which is more relevant for us, because again, in Europe, we have Tatravagónka as our partners. They are there the biggest freight manufacturers, so they consume about close to 20,000 wheelsets annually. Lucchini has its own requirements.

I was, about a month back, I visited a lot of Asian countries, interacted with a lot of Asian railways, and to my surprise, you know, if you look at the entire Asian landscape, there is no relevant wheel manufacturing in Asia; everything is Chinese. So there is so much of opportunity there, and they are all looking for alternatives.

Govindraj Ethiraj: Right. So if I can ask, what's the broad reason why we have not seen wheel manufacturing capacity in India given that we are importing so much? Secondly, the technology that you're bringing in, including from the Italian companies—or the company, rather, Lucchini—where does that technology primarily go, as in what is it? Is it on design, or metallurgy, and so on?

Vivek Lohia: One is that why: because again, you know, this is a very highly capital-intensive investment, there's a lot of technology involved, the gestation periods are much higher. So earlier, you know, the Indian railway industry did not have, I would say, the size to put in that kind of investments. But now, you know, under the current government, they have invested heavily, the size being created, so there is relevance to invest in the technology.

What Lucchini brings in is the whole plethora: they bring in the designs, they bring in the metallurgy, more importantly, they bring in the certifications. And if you're going in the market and competing for a buyer, there are so many suppliers to choose from, they would prefer to go with buyers whom they trust, who they know have the right product. So I think that is which is more relevant for us.

Govindraj Ethiraj: Got it. So what's the timeline for your wheel and axle plans to go on stream?

Vivek Lohia: So wheel and axle: by '27 beginning, we expect the axle line to be commissioned, and maybe a quarter from there, we expect the wheel. So by '27 second quarter or third quarter, we expect both the wheel and axle to be—lines to be running.

Govindraj Ethiraj: Got it. Vivek, thank you so much for joining me.

How India Could Step Up To Receive More Chinese Foreign Direct Investment

Chinese President Xi Jinping travelled to India for the first time in seven years following the border conflict and he came to attend the concluded BRIC summit in New Delhi, which saw him and Prime Minister Narendra Modi meeting on the sidelines. The two countries have now affirmed or rather reaffirmed that they should take a strategic and long term perspective of their ties and on economic and trade relations, which is what we are focussing right now on, they underline the need to address each other's concerns, including structural trade imbalance and supply chain issues and facilitation of meaningful and predictable market access.

The fact that there was a meeting is considered significant by most foreign policy watchers because it can be difficult to further read into statements like these. The proof of the pudding will of course lie in how relations go from here and will issues like denial of business visas to Indian businessmen be addressed. But there is a longer game India and China have to play on the economic arena, according to Dr. Rajiv Kumar, economist and former chairman of Neeti Aayog and now chairman of the Pele India Foundation, who spoke to me on the sidelines of the Elara India Dialogue in Mumbai recently.

I asked Dr. Kumar more specifically about stepping up investments in general in India and what an expanded relationship with China via more foreign direct investment could mean.

INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT

Govindraj Ethiraj: So, you know, a big challenge for India is to reach its 2047 target of developed country, or becoming a developed country. Now, there appear to be many hurdles along the way, including some statistical. What is it that we need to do today, in a very broad sense to start with, to ensure that we are somewhere on the path of achieving that target, and we do not get way late?

Dr. Rajiv Kumar: We need to define the developed economy more carefully. And I think the World Bank's high-income economy status is a good one, which is $14,000. So, you need to go from, let's say, $3,000 to $14,000, that's four times.

And for that, in my view, what you need is growth rate between 8% and 9% for two decades. It's doable. China has shown that they grew 10% three decades perpetually.

We've done 8.3% for about five years, in 2003 to 2011, I think, so that was that period. So, we have to believe that we can do it. But to be able to do it, in my book that I wrote called Everything All at Once, the bottom line is that business as usual, you would simply not do.

You've got to think everything almost like ab initio. What do I mean by that? The role of the public sector.

The Prime Minister himself came and said, when he said minimum government, maximum governance, take the public sector out of the corporate world, etc., etc., all that has pretty much stopped. Now, we need to rethink that as to why we are not privatising. And why am I saying that?

Because if you privatise, and if you privatise assets, and we in ETIO did a whole inventory of public assets, which can be monetised, which includes lands, you can reduce your debt to GDP ratio. If you reduce your debt to GDP ratio, one, go to the FRPM target, but more importantly, you can actually stop using household savings, as much as you do today, to finance your fiscal deficit. The cost of capital will come down, that will help the small and medium enterprises who pay at the moment much less cost of capital.

And similarly for, I mean, agriculture is another sector. You know, we are now water-stressed, we are carbon-stressed, our soil is in the ICU. Even the Prime Minister has said that.

But we persist with the biochemical-based, green revolution-based agriculture, whose expiry date is long over. So, who is thinking new about sustaining agricultural growth, yields, ecology, environment, water, consumer health, farmer's health, and how you do it? The first thing is, therefore, now for that, I have called for what I say, an intellectual Sagar Manthan.

The kind of thing that you had before our national independence, the kind of thing you had when we started our second or third five-year plan, and so on. So, we need now the four principal stakeholders, the government, the business, academia, and the civil society, coming together and actually doing this churn and saying, what is it that we want to do differently? As I said, in large many sectors, you got to do things separate.

And I keep mentioning it. For example, a passenger car-based economy is not for us, because India is the only country in the history of the world, which will have to grow exponentially and reduce its carbon footprint at the same time, plus assure inclusion. So, that's what we need to do.

And I am convinced that if we become a private sector promotional state to begin with, rather than a regulatory state, and I'm not saying anything new, because this is what the Prime Minister has said many times, but in practise, we can achieve that because private sector is the one which will drive our growth and has the potential to drive it into double digits, not just eight and a half.

Govindraj Ethiraj: And when you say promotional state, what does that mean? I mean, going from a regulatory state to promotional state, what would be the manifestation?

Dr. Rajiv Kumar: The private entrepreneur feels welcome at the office when he's going to do something, or the foreign investor.

Govindraj Ethiraj: Which we always say we want to do.

Dr. Rajiv Kumar: Yeah, but you know, we've had a single window for decades. But behind that single window, there are 10 others, most of them, you know, without anybody attending to them. So, when do we want to change that?

When do we want to change the regulations for real estate? Now, you've got RERA. Very good, wonderful.

But RERA shouldn't become a stumbling block in the development, in the growth of the real estate sector. They should help the builders. The essential point is that the promotional state will be one which trusts the private sector and the academia and the civil society and doesn't try to control it because of mistrust.

Now, the other three stakeholders have to earn that trust. That's also important. So is the business.

So, if we work on the basis of trust, then we can achieve that. And my own work now in Pehle India Foundation is that trust, that platform can be best built at the district level, not even at the state level, because the district is about 1.8, 1.9 million people, and people know each other and, you know, and so on. So, if you can make your districts, in a way, the design units or the stakeholder units, I think you can achieve this promotional state.

But that is where it will have to begin. So, what we need to do, which we are trying to do, is to estimate, let's say, the baseline of the district development product, and then use that to set KPIs and try and achieve those. If you do that, the entire governance changes, it gets transformed, you get accountability, you know, you get mutual trust, and therefore, the growth can begin.

The other aspect of that, by the way, is your foreign direct investment when you talk about promotional state. The Model Bilateral Investment Treaty of 2015 was just the opposite. Now for UAE and one other country, we've reduced the exhaustion period to three years instead of five years.

Vietnam and China first engage with the foreign investor, ask what they want to do, try to do that, and if not, then you get into investment treaties. Why can't we do that? Why can't we attract anchored investors and ask them what they want?

This is how Apple came into India, because that started in NITI Aayog, you know, with the Standard Chartered Bank, setting up the first meeting, actually, with the government officials, and the question was asked, what is it? And then it developed. So these are, my view, these are called anchor investors.

How do you attract anchor investors into your PLI sector? So that's the basis of a promotional state. So you go out and you target people and say, what can I do for you?

Rather than, okay, come, we are waiting, you know, and we'll tell you what not to do.

Govindraj Ethiraj: And I'll come to the district part of it, because that sounds interesting in a moment. But tell us about the Apple story. And I'm assuming this was also the time that Apple was wanting to expand out of China.

Dr. Rajiv Kumar: See, this is 2018, I think. It has just started. You know, Abe had just then announced that $2 billion for Japanese companies to move out of China to diversify.

So China country risk was being perceived as a real country risk. And Apple, the story is that Standard Chartered people came to meet me and I was talking and so on. And they are the principal bankers to Apple in China.

I think Standard Chartered is Hong Kong. So and I said, look, they said, we will try. And they contacted Apple and Apple agreed to send their team to Delhi.

And we had a day long meeting. And then they said, decided, oh, well, we and to that came along the Meti person.

Govindraj Ethiraj: Ministry of Electronics.

Dr. Rajiv Kumar: Yeah, that conversation started. And slowly but surely, you know, they said this is what they needed, etc. And that happened.

For example, one of the things they wanted was the flexibility to bring in the Chinese vendors. To begin with, there was a pushback, but no, we accepted that. And they brought them in.

And that's how they established now. And now what? $20 billion export?

Again, the question started about value addition. We have them get over that and saying that backward integration will happen subsequently. These are the sort of things that, you know, we need to do with in every sector.

You know, we can very often distinguish between what I call the shotgun approach and the rifle approach. And I learned it from a gentleman called Sahadevan, who used to run the export processing zone in Penang in Malaysia. So, you know, shotgun approach, one of the ducks will fall, doesn't approach.

You know, you got to target each one of the PLI sectors. If you can target four, three, go for them, bring them in and make the person in that ministry responsible for it. Okay, how many did you target?

How many did you get? What's happened? Your FDI can go n-fold because of potential events.

I think Vietnam gets more than twice as much as we do. Why not? I've been talking about for a while, I must be immodest enough to say that led to the removal of the press note fees and, you know, the neighbouring countries.

So, that's, you know, opening. And many people will testify that, you know, the flights will resume, etc. I think we need to be a lot more open on this.

Because I think the message still in the system is that China is a security risk. And whenever you whisper the word national security, everything else becomes secondary. So, I think that needs to be taken away.

Now, I'm not for a minute saying that you should lower your guard on national security. I'm not for a minute saying that you should not, you know, keep the borders as they are. Do more if you can.

But I think learn from the Chinese themselves. They had the largest investment in their country with countries with whom they fought wars, you know, Japan and US, for example, right? And that's what they use.

And our war, you know, the one big one was how many years ago, more than 60 years ago. It's time now to change that, right? So, that's what I'm trying to say.

And the Chinese have surplus capital. Why shouldn't we let them keep investing in US treasuries? You know, they've got $250 billion outgoing FDI.

And they've been willing. And now the thing that I heard actually gives me greater confidence is that their own demand thing is domestic demand will not going to fuel their growth. So, they need a market, you know, for their products and so on.

And India can offer that. That sense, it's a win-win.

Govindraj Ethiraj: But Chinese investment traditionally has stayed within China and the products have come out to some extent, of course.

Dr. Rajiv Kumar: They've invested in Latin America. They've invested in Africa in a big way.

Govindraj Ethiraj: And in India too, but in small ways, maybe.

Dr. Rajiv Kumar: India, they wanted to. The example that I give quite often is that the Great Wall Motors of China, based out of Shanghai, which produces, I think, variants of Volkswagen and so on, they took over the entire Ford facility in Maharashtra. The Ford moved out and they bought it out.

And after six years, they met me thrice in there and I tried my best. They packed their bags and went. Because you wouldn't allow visas for their corporate people, et cetera, et cetera.

So, they have demonstrated their intent to come and invest here. So, why not let them do that? They wanted Huawei, for example.

We effectively banned them from investing on the, you know, okay, that's a security, it's a telecom thing. There are thousands of things that you can do. Similarly, with QCOs, why do we have that whole army of QCOs for inputs coming in from China?

API, Advanced Pharmaceutical Ingredients. We are totally dependent on them. So, if they want to invest and produce, what's the harm?

Govindraj Ethiraj: So, you're saying that Chinese drug manufacturers would be willing to set up and manufacture in India?

Dr. Rajiv Kumar: I'm just saying, let's find out. And I'm saying, let's find out actively and in a non-hostile manner. You know, make it easier for them.

And I'm very glad that Mr. Doval has gone. Mr. Nwange has come and now this is happening. So, this is the big opportunity.

I think you can conserve your geopolitical space between Kabul and Yangon much better by working with them, rather than get them, you know, doing the Singapore etc. etc. So, why not?

If you can do that.

Govindraj Ethiraj: So, when you say Kabul and Yangon, you mean the China in between or?

Dr. Rajiv Kumar: No, no, South Asian space. If you're antagonistic, then it's going to be them versus us in this space. Is it needed?

Is it required? I mean, that's what I'm trying to say.

Govindraj Ethiraj: So, as things stand today, do you see or are you hopeful for more foreign direct investment from China?

Dr. Rajiv Kumar: I think they want it. It's for us to determine. Can we dilute our sovereign ego to be able to get there and be pragmatic enough?