apart from pushing trade with other countries commerce industry minister anand sharma has been trying to step up the share of manufacturing in indias economy as also foreign direct investment inflows he spoke to sidhartha surojit gupta about the slowdown scams and their impact on policymaking excerptsgrowth seems to be moderating and there is an impression of policy paralysis due to the developments on the political front what is your assessment of the investment climate there are various factors that get reflected in upswing or downswing of the investments we have done commendably in the last three years of late there has been a decline last year we didnt do as well as we should have done and we have reviewed it we are trying to reach out to our global partners through various initiatives we have concluded several comprehensive economic partnership agreements where investments are included in addition we are further strengthening invest india the notforprofit company which the government set up in partnership with ficci we are now looking at sectorspecific engagements in infrastructure engineering and agro and fruit processing so we hope that our collective efforts will yield positive dividends india needs investments and there is no doubt that there has to be a focused thrust on the policy side policy formulation is always calibrated it has happened elsewhere in the world in a similar manner its never abrupt at least in india and it is always incremental the moves are only in one direction forward have you been bogged down by a string of scams this is an impression which may have been created but this is not correct we have not deviated from our focus on the contrary we have worked with a very firm conviction to take the things forward to ensure that targets that we set for ourselves are met if not exceeded what are you doing to address higher input costs and higher interest rates how are you addressing fears of a slowdown that is a concern i have discussed the issue with the finance minister and the prime minister the rbi and the fms concerns are on inflation i have requested that if at least for specific sectors in the manufacturing sector there is a separate window for credit that goes only for capacity building or capacity creation this is still under discussion yes there have been some concerns of late i will be frank particularly when the minimum alternate tax was imposed on sezs we had hoped that it would be aligned with the dtc it came ahead of that i have taken it up with the finance minister who is fully sensitive to my concerns are you also talking of interest rate subvention for exporters high interest rates pose a big challenge to our exporters because then we are not globally competitive the overall rate for them was working out close to 7 but now there has been a 4 jump i have discussed this and