Participating in the meeting, EEPC India chairman Mr Mahesh Desai also proposed to withdraw export duty on selected steel items as it will be especially helpful for the MSMEs which have a significant contribution in India’s engineering exports.

Sitharaman said India was at a cusp of change and regulators had to be aligned with that change. "You need regulators also to be aligned with that change, recognise that change, and be ready for it ... otherwise you will be late, and delay in regulation can hit the people, and also institutions and the economy," she said.

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had announced earlier this year that government would set up an expert committee to address regulatory issues faced by the venture capital and private equity players.

Inflation in India has remained above the Reserve Bank of India's 2%-6% tolerance band for eight consecutive months and rose to 7% in August, driven by surging costs of food items.

Politicians are worried about the impact of sharp increase in prices on household essentials. For example, food inflation, which accounts for nearly 40% of the CPI basket, rose 7.62% year on year in August compared to a revised 6.69% in July, the National Statistics Office said on Monday.

With completely banning the export of broken rice, a byproduct of milling rice, India, the world's largest rice exporter, had imposed a 20% export duty on all rice varieties aside from basmati and parboiled rice.

Before the Russia-Ukraine crisis, 70 per cent of the sunflower oil imported by India used to come from Ukraine, while 20 per cent from Russia. But imports have been severely affected after the invasion of Ukraine by Russia in late February this year.

Speaking at the release of book titled Recalibrate: Changing Paradigm, the minister said, there is a strong case for setting up of Fiscal Council as recommended in the book to further strengthen the fiscal discipline.

Reserves fell $89 bn in ten months to $553 bn as of September 2022, but are adequate to cover 8.9 month of imports compared to 4.1 months in May 2013 and ratio of short-term debt to reserves at 44 per cent compared to 60 per cent in June 2013 an analysis of official data shows.