LISBON, June 27 — Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee played the charming CEO of India Inc while addressing the European business community at the India-EU Business Summit here today.

Besides highlighting the merits of India’s ‘new economy’, he made a concerted sales pitch for foreign direct investment. The Prime Minister admitted that there were hurdles in the path of quick project implementation. That is why out of the total approved FDI from the European Union of nearly $ 13 billion, actual flows had amounted to only just $ 3 billion, yielding a modest realisation ratio of below 25 per cent.

To remedy the situation, Mr Vajpayee promised to constitute a Joint Government-Industry Group with the twin objective of resolving specific project difficulties and ensuring that the approvals for the FDI are realised in a much shorter gestation period.

Two critical areas where he specifically sought investment were infrastructure (particularly power and ports) and financial services. He expressed his government’s willingness to consider a new guarantee structure for large transmission and power purchase systems and accelerating the competitive bidding process for renovation and modernisation of Indian power generating companies.

The offer to extend counter-guarantees to transmission happens to be a new and significant development.

Reminding the potential investors of the major disinvestment programme announced a few days ago, the Prime Minister stressed that this spelt not only a short-term policy of what India proposed to do this year, but also specified the undertakings that would be progressively disinvested over the next three years. These would include leading companies like Indian Airlines, Air-India, oil companies and other organisations spanning the economic spectrum.

Earlier today, Mr Vajpayee flew into the Portugese Capital in a special Air-India Harsh Vardhan plane. While the Finance Minister, Mr Yashwant Sinha, was with him, the Minister of Commerce and Industry, Mr Murasoli Maran, and the Information and Technology Minister, Mr Pramod Mahajan, joined him here.

If it was FICCI which utilised the Prime Minister’s Italy visit to interact with the industry leaders of that country, it was the CII which organised the India-EU business summit here. It was attended by over 200 businessmen from all 15 EU countries, making it almost a ‘recreation of Davos’. The CII is here with a delegation of 31 top Indian CEOs.

Four sectoral sessions of infrastructure, information technology and telecom, biotech and R and D and financial services were held. These provided an opportunity to potential investors to gain first-hand information from Indian corporates.

The goal is to have $ 10 billion of investment from the EU over the next two years. Industry leaders are keen to cooperate fully with the government in its investment and trade promotion efforts.

Meanwhile, Italy, which was expected to seek at best 7,000 IT experts from India has upped the ante to nearly 15,000 over the next three years. That can translate into big strides for the sunrise industry in India.

A small section of these will be trainers who will help the Italians come up on the IT map. The rest will be IT experts who will be absorbed in the mainstream here through green cards.