NEW DELHI, Dec 5: Foreign investment approvals by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) have ballooned in 1997. While foreign investment proposals approved by the RBI were worth Rs 1,200 crore in 1996, the figure for the period upto August 97 had already crossed Rs 3,900 crore. This is more than three times the 1996 figure. In fact, these figures for the first eight months of 1997 account for half the investment which came in, in the entire 1991-1997 period.Over the same period the foreign investment proposals cleared by the FIPB remained largely the same. While the figure was Rs 33,700 crore in 1996, the investment cleared this year till August was Rs 29,300 crore.A similar pattern appeared on the actual flow of foreign investment. The investment contracted through RBI's automatic approval route in 1996 was about Rs 619 crore, the contracted investment till August this year was Rs 565 crore. Industry Ministry expected this figure to be much above the 1996 figure by the time 1997 ends.This trend has emerged because of the expansion of automatic approval list done by the United Front Government. The list for automatic approval was expanded on 31 December 1996. The objective was to remove the adhocism in foreign investment clearances and to make the procedure more transparent. By shifting more industries to the RBI's automatic approval list, the Government could concentrate on the sectors where clear policies were yet to be formed by deliberating on the proposals in the FIPB. Sources say that these figures show that RBI is not a bottleneck for foreign investment clearance as had been apprehended.
