New Delhi: A majority of Indians welcome foreign investment in India but at the same time, they feel that dominance of foreign investors in certain key sectors is dangerous for the country, according to the IANS-CVoter Consumer Tracker.
The CVoter Tracker is India’s only daily Opinion Tracking exercise mapping more than a hundred thousand randomly selected respondents in a calendar year. The tracker is run in 11 Indian languages and has interviewed more than a million respondents in person and CATI over the last ten years. The sample size was 3,000 all India as part of the main tracker.
Interestingly, the opinion of respondents seemed to differ when it came to different sectors.
For example, more than 52 per cent of Indians find foreign investors’ dominance to be extremely dangerous for the country in the defence sector. This is to be expected.
However, 48.6 per cent of Indians also find foreign investors’ dominance to be extremely dangerous in the entertainment sector including movies, OTT platforms and TV channels. The reality is that the entertainment sector, particularly the OTT platforms and streaming services are already dominated by foreign players like Netflix, Amazon Prime and Disney Hotstar.
In contrast just about 27 per cent of Indians think that foreign investors’ dominance is extremely dangerous while 31 per cent find it extremely dangerous in the education sector. Respondents were asked to categorise their opinion as extremely dangerous, somewhat dangerous and not dangerous at all. Of the ten sectors surveyed, a combination of extreme dangerous and somewhat dangerous was the majority opinion in all ten sectors. The not dangerous at all opinion reached its peak in the education sector with a score of 42 per cent.
There were more interesting differences revealed by the C-Voter survey. While more than 47 per cent of Indians found foreign investors’ dominance to be extremely dangerous in the telecom, mobile and Internet sector, just about 32 per cent found it to be the same in the consumer durables sector. Even in the agriculture sector, 45.5 per cent of Indians found foreign investors’ dominance to be extremely dangerous. The conclusion is clear. Indians do welcome foreign investments. But they do not want them to completely dominate the Indian market at the cost of Indian entrepreneurs.
IANS