Transcript: India insights and opportunities
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Nicola Watkinson ‒ Senior Trade Commissioner South Asia
Nicola is responsible for developing trade, investment and education links between Australia and South Asia. She oversees over 65 staff in 16 offices across India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.
After a career in the private sector in the UK and with the Victorian Government in Melbourne, Nicola joined Austrade in 2003. A German speaker, Nicola’s roles in Austrade span Senior Trade and Investment Commissioner, West Europe based in Frankfurt, Global Head of Investment and Senior Investment Commissioner for Europe, Middle East and Africa. She has also worked in North Asian markets with a particular focus on Japan, China and Korea.
Transcript
>>Nicola Watkinson: There are about one trillion worth of opportunities in the infrastructure sector alone, and Austrade sees this area as highly prospective for Australian business. In the rail area alone there is going to be a real game changer in India. The government has committed to two dedicated freight corridors whose objective is to turn the transport time from north to south in India, which currently takes about 12-14 days, down to about 13-14 hours, and in order to do that they’re going to build over 3,300km worth of rail lines. And when I was talking to the head of the Mumbai-Delhi Freight Corridor Project earlier this week, one of the things they said is that they see Australia as one of only three competent nations that are going to be able to provide the expertise that they need in order to make this project a success, and that means that there is much less competition for this sort of work for Australian business and already a predilection by the Indian government to working with Australian business.
The second area is in health infrastructure. At the moment this is growing rapidly at over 20% a year and is highlighted as one of the major priorities for the Indian government. The reason for that is at the moment India has only 860 beds per million people compared to a world average of 4,000. The other thing that really stands out in this area for Australian business is up to 100% of private investment is permitted in this area.
One of the things we help with is to mitigate the risk that can be involved in going into an emerging market such as India. So some of the things we help with are helping to identify the best place, the best region or city or state to start in India. It’s not just one market, it is many markets and part of the success factor is identifying the best place for your business.
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