Bharti Group Chairman Sunil Mittal met Union Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal in New Delhi in December and raised a host of issues, including faster clearances, goods and services tax (GST) refund, bottlenecks in mergers and acquisitions, and the groups’ investment plans for the next five years that currently stands at Rs 18,000 crore a year. “We discussed infrastructure sector—telecom, tower, solar, real estate—and our investment plans for the next 5 years. We spend Rs 20,000 crore a year on telecom. We told the Minister about our investment plans and apprised him of the bottlenecks where his intervention would be required,” Mittal said after meeting Goyal.

He said the group needed help in facilitating clearances from aviation authorities, real estate side, and issues around larger grids for solar parks. “We plan to make a lot of investment and just need little bit of encouragement from the government in terms of getting faster clearances,” he said.

Mittal also pointed to M&A issues and said merger of Tata’s consumer mobile business with Airtel was yet to be cleared. The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) has moved the Supreme Court against the Telecom Disputes Settlement and Appellate Tribunal’s (TDSAT) decision.