Lifting people out of poverty to be a big agenda in India’s G20 presidency: Amitabh Kant

In an exclusive interview to CNBC-TV18, Amitabh Kant, India's G20 Sherpa expressed his belief that a key goal of the country's G20 presidency will be to speed up the process of pulling people out of poverty.

“There are various challenges which India is confronted with – there is a geopolitical challenge, there is global supply chain disruption, there is global debt, 200 million people have gone below poverty line post COVID, 100 million people have lost their jobs. Therefore how do we accelerate the pace of lifting people above the poverty line will be a central issue,” Kant said.

Kant said Prime Minister Modi wants India’s G20 presidency to be action oriented, ambitious and decisive. He added that the Prime Minister wants India’s health, ayurveda and pharma potential to assist the world.

“The Prime Minister wants India’s presidency to be very action oriented, ambitious and decisive. More than anything else he wants India to be very different from other countries and he wants to leave the stamp of the India narrative during this presidency. PM Modi is very clear that in health India has a unique model. India is a pharmacy of the world, India is the vaccine capital of the world, and so how do we accelerate the Indian model - which is integrated wellness, Ayurveda, yoga etc to assist the rest of the world will be the key focus area,” Kant added.

Kant believes that G20 will give India an opportunity to improve its infrastructure and showcase its tourism potential.

“G20 provides India an opportunity to welcome a large number of G20 guests. We are doing 200 events in 55 cities of India and so this gives us an opportunity to improve the quality of infrastructure, showcase our culture, our cuisine etc.”

According to Kant, China, IMF and the private sector need to come together and arrange a debt relief package for the world.

Kant said, “70 countries around the world are impacted by global debt crisis. Once countries start falling apart, you will see the whole financial architecture crumbling down. The challenge however is that China has given a lot of debt to these countries. Therefore it cannot be that IMF provides a package which goes to pay the Chinese debt and which in several cases has been termed as opaque and non-transparent. So, China, IMF and the private sector, all three need to sit together and work out a complete comprehensive package for these countries. So we need to discuss this out during our presidency so that we are able to bring everybody together on a global debt package.”