India is the world's fastest-growing major economy and offers investors a combination of scale, sustained growth, a young population, expanding consumption and rapidly deepening capital markets, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said while pitching the country to Canadian investors.
Addressing prominent members of the Indian business community in Toronto, Sitharaman said India offered Canadian investors with a long-term horizon an investment proposition that was difficult to match.
"India offers a combination that is difficult to match: scale, sustained growth, a young population, expanding consumption and rapidly deepening capital markets," she said.
Sitharaman said India's transformation was structural, driven by rapid urbanisation, a growing middle class and world-class digital infrastructure, creating opportunities across virtually every sector of the economy.
She also highlighted the role of India's digital ecosystem in transforming access to financial and commercial services. The country's digital infrastructure has significantly reduced the cost of access while expanding the reach of these services.
By transaction volume, the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) is the world's largest real-time payments system and has become an important tool for financial inclusion, efficiency and innovation, she said.
"There are significant opportunities here for collaboration with Canadian banks, fintech companies and regulators, not only in payments, but in shaping the next generation of digital financial infrastructure," Sitharaman said.
Highlighting the growing India-Canada economic partnership, she described the Indian diaspora in Canada as a strategic bridge between the two countries.
"This is a community that sits inside Canadian boardrooms, on the trading floors of Bay Street, inside the risk committees of the pension funds," she said.
Sitharaman said India-Canada bilateral ties had undergone a remarkable transformation in recent times, supported by shared democratic and pluralistic values, expanding economic engagement, high-level interactions and strong people-to-people ties.
Referring to the agreement between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Canadian counterpart, Mark Carney, on the sidelines of the G7 Summit in June 2025 to reset bilateral ties, she said the two countries had reaffirmed their commitment to a future-focused strategic partnership.
The partnership was further strengthened during Carney's visit to India earlier this year, when the two countries formally launched negotiations for a Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA), signed a CAD 2.6 billion uranium agreement with Cameco, adopted 'Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam' as the overarching framework of the renewed strategic partnership and issued a joint declaration of ambition to more than double bilateral trade to CAD 70 billion by 2030.
Sitharaman said the bilateral partnership was increasingly moving beyond capital flows towards deeper institutional engagement.
"Capital markets are only one dimension of a modern financial partnership," she said, underlining the scope for broader economic and financial cooperation between India and Canada.
(With inputs from PTI)
