Indian Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said, “India’s economy growth is likely to be robust at 8.9 percent in the current financial year, reflecting the country’s strong resilience and speedy recovery”. Also added that India will continue to achieve a high growth rate in the next financial year as well.

Indian Finance Minister was addressing the 7th Annual Meeting of the Board of Governors of New Development Bank (NDB).

The meeting was also attended by Governors/Alternative Governors of Brazil, China, Russia, South Africa and the newly joined members Bangladesh and United Arab Emirates (UAE). Due to pandemic restriction this Annual Meeting of NDB whish was hosted/chaired by India this year was organised in virtual mode. This year’s theme for the Annual Meeting was, “NDB: Optimising Development Impact”, which is particularly relevant in the current global economic scenario.

New Development Bank

The New Development Bank (NDBO), formerly referred to as the BRICS Development Bank was established by the BRICS states i.e. Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa in July 2014. According to the Agreement on the NDB, “the Bank shall support public or private projects through loans, guarantees, equity participation and other financial instruments”. The initial authorised capital of the bank is $ 100 billion and the subscribed capital is $ 50 billion which was equally distributed among the founding members.

The bank is head quartered in Shangai, China. K V Kamath, from India is the first elected president, he was replace as president by Marcos Prado Trayjo of Brazil in 2020.

Objectives

The bank aims to contribute to the development plans as below.

• Promote infrastructure and sustainable development projects with a significant development impact in member countries.
• Establish an extensive network of global partnerships with other multilateral development institutions and national development banks.
• Build a balanced project portfolio giving a proper respect to their geographic location, financing requirements and other factors.

The NDB member states represents :

The Bank was operationalised in 2015. Last year NDB has expanded its membership to include four countries, Bangladesh, UEA, Egypt and Uruguay. It has so far approved 21 projects of India for an amount of $ 7.1 billion. Finance Minister also appreciated the progress made towards setting up of the India Regional Office in Gift City, Gujarat.