Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who arrived in Pittsburgh today, will support the United States of America’s draft proposal calling for “sustainable and balanced world growth” that also increases the voting rights of developing countries such as India in multilateral institutions. It will, however, not agree to bind India to any emission reduction targets on climate change that is emerging as a main agenda item in the Group of 20 Summit.

A draft US communique leaked a day before the Pittsburgh Summit kicks off to Reuters news agency sought an agreement by world leaders on a framework that includes coordinated economic policies to achieve faster world growth without creating asset bubbles and unsustainable financial flows. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has always said that the global financial crisis, though not of the making of developing countries, is hurting them the most. It had dried up external sources of private funding, shrunk trade volumes and also choked portfolio capital inflows.

The US proposal to give major developing countries increased voting rights at the International Monetary Fund would be a “substantial step in the right direction,” Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Deputy Chairman, Planning Commission said. “If the US proposes 5 percentage points, although it’s less than what the BRICs had proposed (7 percentage points), it would certainly be a very significant shift in voting power,” he told Reuters ahead of the G20 Summit.

Singh, who is scheduled to speak in the first Plenary Session here, is also in sync with the United States on the need to continue with the stimulus programme through 2010. “Though there has been a lot of improvement since the two summits in Washington DC (in November 2008) and London (April 2009), the global economy is still not out of the woods,” Singh said in a statement.

... contd.