India needs to ramp up bilateral relations for trade, investment: Nirmala Sitharaman

NEW DELHI: Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Thursday said India needs to ramp up its bilateral relations for trade and investment, as the world is witnessing a churn, and bilateralism seems to be the new catalyst tool.

Speaking at BS Manthan, the Finance Minister said these are very interesting yet challenging times and the government is making all efforts to make India move up the ladder and be an engine of global growth.

“Bilateralism is now taking the top of the agenda… It is for us to ramp up our bilateral relations with many countries, not just for trade, not just for investment, but also for strategic relations. So multilateralism, sort of, out, I’m still saying with a qualifying word ‘sort of out’, but bilateralism is very much your only catalytic tool that you can use,” she said. PTI