Budget 2024: India-Middle East-Europe corridor a ‘strategic and economic game changer’

India Budget 2024: Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman hailed India’s G20 presidency and described the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) forged during the New Delhi Leaders’ Summit as a “strategic and economic game changer”.  The connectivity project aims to facilitate the flow of commerce, energy and data to, from and between India the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Israel and Europe.

“India assumed G20 presidency during very difficult times for the world,” Sitharaman said in Lok Sabha while presenting India’s interim budget for 2024 ahead of general elections in the spring in which Prime Minister Narendra Modi is seeking a third term in power. 

“The global economy was going through high inflation, high-interest rates, low growth, very high public debt, low trade growth and climate challenges. The [COVID-19] pandemic had led to a crisis of food, fertiliser. fuel and finances for the world, while India successfully navigated its way,” Sitharaman added. 

“The country showed the way forward and built consensus on solutions for those global problems,” the Indian finance minister said while referring to the joint statement delivered as G20 New Delhi Leaders’ Declaration. 

Referring to the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), Sitharaman repeated Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s remarks that the corridor “will become the basis of world trade for hundreds of years to come, and history will remember that this corridor was initiated on Indian soil.” 

India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor | WION

Finance Minister Sitharaman’s remarks came a day after India’s President Droupadi Murmu, in her ceremonial address to the parliament ahead of the budget session, hailed the IMEC as an ambitious connectivity initiative. “This corridor will further strengthen India’s maritime capability,” President Murmu said. 

The IMEC is the latest in the series of connectivity projects that India is looking to strategically and economically leverage, apart from the North-South International Corridor, and the Chennai-Vladivostok project. 

The India-Middle East-Europe Economic corridor was previously described by US President Joe Biden as a project that is aimed at building a “better future for the Middle East”, and the one that will make West Asia “more stable, better connected to its neighbours”. 

Biden on October 29, said that with the “innovative projects such as India-Middle East-Europe economic corridor that we announced earlier this year in the summit of the world’s biggest economies”, the region will benefit with “predictable markets, more employment, less rage, and less grievances.”

Sitharaman on Feb 1 also gave details of grants and loans to foreign governments, in which Maldives was given the maximum allocation.

Sitharaman delivered her sixth consecutive Union Budget speech on Thursday (Feb 1) and pitched the growing economic prospects of the world’s fifth-largest economy as an imminent sign of India becoming a developed nation in the coming decades.