Opinion | Take our market, give us jobs: India’s offer to investors

The beleaguered Indian economy is finally making a sensible bargain with the rest of the world: “Take our billion-plus customers, give us jobs.”

Under a new foreign direct investment policy announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government Wednesday, India is undertaking its biggest liberalization of single-brand retail in seven years. One major concession: Contentious local sourcing requirements will need to be met as an average for the first five-year period, not annually.

That’s a big help to Apple Inc., which will no longer have to struggle with a 30% local procurement norm to open its long-awaited own store in India and will now have time to scale up what it buys from Taiwanese contractor Wistron Corp.’s Bangalore factory.