Mumbai: Even while the domestic economy is showing very little signs of recovery and growth, India’s richest man Mukesh Ambani on Tuesday reaffirmed his belief that India will grow to be among the top three economies of the world in the next two decades.
The Reliance Industries chairman also said the country’s per capita income will double in the same period.
“I firmly believe that in the next two decades, India will grow to be among the top three economies in the world,” Ambani said in a virtual interaction with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in the ‘Facebook Fuel for India 2020’ event.
“(Besides) It will be a modern society with young people driving it, with young businesses driving it. And our per capita income will go from eighteen hundred – two thousand dollars per capita to five thousand dollars per capita,” he added.
Ambani also said that the middle class in India, which is about 50 per cent of its total number of households, will grow to three to four percent per year.
“And I think that Facebook, Jio, and a lot of other companies and entrepreneurs in the world, have a golden opportunity to be in India, to be part of this economic and social transformation, that we are witnessing and that will accelerate in the coming decades,” Ambani added.
Calling India a very special and important country with a remarkable entrepreneurship culture, Zuckerberg touched upon a multitude of topics as he sought to push the just-launched payments services that allow users to make payments over WhatsApp.
Ambani, on the other hand, talked about explosive access to mobile data in the country, Facebook-Jio platforms investments, and the future of technology in India.
“We are looking forward to your involvement in India. I hope the rest of the world learns from Indian policy,” Ambani told Zuckerberg.
In April, Facebook had announced an investment of USD 5.7 billion (Rs 43,574 crore) in Jio Platforms. He also said Facebook’s investment in Jio “set the ball rolling” for large foreign direct investment (FDI) into India.