MUMBAI: Reliance Industries chairman Mukesh Ambani on Wednesday said that India will be self-sufficient in the energy sector with reasonable investments in the next 20-30 years. “In the next decade, India will not import 80% of its energy,” he said.“We have a path and God- willing, like with technological breakthroughs, we will be reasonably self-sufficient in energy investments. These are 20-30-year time horizons,” Ambani explained.Ambani was in conversation with Larry Fink, chairman & CEO, BlackRock Inc, one of the world’s largest investment management firms with assets worth more than $11 trillion.Jio BlackRock is the Indian joint venture between RIL and BlackRock. The RIL chief also said that in the next 20-30 years, India’s GDP could leapfrog from the current level of about $4.5 trillion to about $25-30 trillion. “I see (India) outgrowing the world and finding the right place. I am one of those believers who think that this $4-4.5 trillion in a 20-30-year period will outgrow the rest of the world, and we will hit $25-$30 trillion. As we do that, the India opportunity is a 10-20-, 30-year opportunity.”During the conversation, Fink said that the next two decades-and-a-half could be India’s era. “As an investor, our job is to have people focus on the real opportunities to invest over a lifetime. When you think about the growth of India, it’s not a quarter, or a day or a week, or a year. It’s over a long horizon. And you could say maybe this is the era for India and will be so over the next 20-25 years,” Fink said.On a relatively granular level, Ambani feels that in India there are quite a few areas that would need patient capital in the next few decades. Among them are investments in physical infrastructure and technology infrastructure so that every village has intelligence available to them. Each of these are opportunities worth hundreds of billions of dollars, that in turn would offer long-term sustainable compoundable opportunities which would come both from within and outside of the country, he said.Drawing upon his experience in the US, the BlackRock chief said that people who had invested in the growth of the country over the years were far better off than those who kept their money in bank accounts.“If you believe in the era of India, which I believe in, we need to get more people investing alongside the growth of a country. And that’s the role of the capital markets. The focus should be on how we live, how we grow, how we educate ourselves. Those are subsets of the era of India, and the opportunity to be an investor alongside the growth of India.”
About the Author
