With India Inc emerging as an important player in the global merger and acquisition market, the government has decided to release the data on outward investments every month from next fiscal.
The Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion is closely working with the Reserve Bank of India, DIPP's joint secretary Gopal Krishna told reporters in New Delhi at a Confederation of Indian Industry function.
At present, the government releases detail foreign direct investment inflows to India on a monthly basis, Krishna said.
"There is a very good data base on inward investment, pretty great amount of detail information is there. But such kind of data for outward investment is still missing. Data about outward investment is very sketchy," he said.
DIPP was working with a committee headed by RBI Deputy Governor Shyamala Gopinath regarding this.
The committee has devised a format for detail collection of outward fund flows.
"RBI has devised a format and that will now be coming to us and filtering to us...now we can further analyse, exactly the way we analyse the inward investments," he said.
Krishna said the data is likely to be released on monthly basis from April.
"I hope that it will start from April, than we release this on monthly basis like we release for inward investments," he added.
In recent years, Tata's acquired British marquee Jaguar Land Rover, Bharti Airtel purchased significant stake in Bangladesh-based telecom firm Warid and Mahindra bought two Australian aerospace firms.
Krishna said the data would be significantly useful for researchers, academicians and industry people as well.
According to the RBI, during the quarter July-September 2009, 1,127 proposals amounting to $4.8 billion (about Rs 22,440 crore) were cleared for investments in joint ventures and wholly-owned subsidiaries as against 1,180 proposals worth $5.6 billion (about Rs 26,180 crore) during the corresponding period of the previous year.
As per a CII report, the US was the largest recipient of India's outbound mergers and acquisition investments. It was valued at $440 million in 2009.
