Planning commission pushing for sovereign wealth fund

The Planning Commission is in favour of setting up of a sovereign wealth fund with an initial corpus of $10 billion, for making investments mainly in energy and mining assets abroad.

"Sovereign Wealth Fund is something that the Finance Ministry is looking at. We have suggested to start with $10 billion," Planning Commission deputy chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia told reporters in New Delhi on the sidelines of a FICCI event.

Sovereign Wealth Funds are a government-owned corpus for pooling money from state resources for investing in overseas assets.

India has been planning to set up its own fund for acquisition of strategic overseas assets in mining and energy segments to meet its future needs.

Countries like China and Singapore have already set up their sovereign wealth funds, with China even having acquired significant assets overseas through investment from its $400 billion fund in recently.

Regarding GDP growth in the current fiscal, Ahluwalia said to achieve an economic expansion target of 8 per cent in the current financial year would the growth in the second half of the year would be crucial.