A G20 domestic outreach event was organised on the theme ‘G20 Sustainable Finance Working Group: Towards Strong, Sustainable, Balanced, and Inclusive growth (SSBIG)’ at Banaras Hindu University (BHU) here on Tuesday on the eve of the 4th G20 Sustainable Finance Working Group (SFWG) Meeting in the city.
The welcome address in the domestic outreach event was given by Dr Balu Kenchappa, Regional Director, Reserve Bank of India (RBI), Lucknow. The keynote address was delivered by Geetu Joshi, Adviser, Ministry of Finance, Government of India. In her keynote address, she highlighted the key outcomes of the G20 leaders’ summit held in New Delhi recently, viz, achieving strong, sustainable, balanced, and inclusive growth, accelerating progress on sustainable development goals (SDGs), green development pact for a sustainable future, developing multilateral institutions for the 21st century, technological transformation and digital public infrastructure, and gender equality and empowering all women and girls. The G20 event had two sessions with session-I comprising experience sharing presentations on the theme ‘Scaling up Social Impact Investment in India’. The presentations were on social stock exchange by Abhishek Rozatkar, AGM, SEBI and on development impact bond by Vijaylakshmi Saxena, CFO, Educate Girls respectively. Session-II comprised a panel discussion on all the priority areas of the G20 SFWG. The panel discussion was moderated by Brij Raj, Chief General Manager, RBI. The panelists comprised Dr Dhruba Purkayastha, India Director, CPI, Ashwini Kumar Tewari, MD, SBI and Roshika Singh, Senior Country Officer, India - IFC. The panelists offered rich insights from their vast experience on the topic and gave several useful suggestions on the priority areas of the G20 SFWG ie ‘mechanisms for mobilisation of timely and adequate resources for climate finance’, ‘enabling finance for the SDGs’ and ‘capacity building of the ecosystem for financing toward sustainable development’ respectively.
The G20 event was highly interactive and attended by over 250 participants. Officials from the Ministry of Finance, Government of India and RBI, etc participated in the event. The event also had participation from commercial banks, small finance banks, NBFCs, etc apart from the faculty and PG students of BHU.