PM returns home after G-20 summit

After ending a ‘satisfactory’ official journey to G-20 summit in London, the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh arrived here in the wee hours of Saturday.

Dr Singh expressed satisfaction over his meetings with US President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown saying that they are all united on fighting with global terrorism and recession.

Besides attending the annual G-20 summit, Singh had also held separate bilateral meetings with Obama and Brown on various regional and global issues, including the present security situation in South Asia.

‘Well, we did discuss the development in Afghanistan and Pakistan. And India and USA both agreed that our countries must work together to counter the forces of terror,’ said Singh before leaving London on Friday.

The prime minister effectively attended the summit, where he strongly put the views of India, and pledged to contribute more to the world’s top most financial institutions like International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank (WB) and Asian Development Bank (ADB), as part of the global effort to enable these institutions to lend more.

India is willing to lend Rs 1,00,000-crore ($20-billion) to IMF, WB and ADB in two years. Currently, it contributes Rs 50,000-crore ($10-billion) alone to IMF, while it needs to contribute similar amounts in other two international financial bodies.

On the other hand, India has approached the World Bank for additional debt of $5.2-billion in a span of two years for recapitalizing its financial sector and infrastructure projects, sources said. At present, WB lends India $3-billion per annum.

Most of the part in desired debt is expected to allocate on refilling the liquidity in state-owned commercial banks while remaining amount will be spend on infrastructure finance companies and power grid corporations, sources said.

Moreover, the members of G-20 also agreed to sell IMF gold reserves to raise the fund to $6 billion that would be used for lending world’s poorest countries at cheaper rates within next two to three years.

India also raised its voice to negotiate a speedy conclusion of the Doha trade round and put additional $250 billion into trade finance.

Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey and the EU are the other member countries in G-20, besides India, USA and UK.