The government's divestment programme helped, albeit marginally, attract foreign direct investment worth more than $4 billion in 2002-03, a year ravaged by war, communal tensions, drought and global economic slowdown.

India was among a handful of countries that witnessed a rise in FDI inflow as global FDI flow declined owing to several reasons, including decline in investments by American companies, which took extreme caution in clearing investment proposals in the wake of several accounting scams.

Sources in the Reserve Bank of India said the data for the year was still being collated. "These are provisional figures based on the current accounting standards. If the revised standards based on the guidelines issued by the International Monetary Fund are used, the figure could touch $10 billion. This, of course, does not include proceeds from round tripping -- money rerouted as FDI through tax havens like Mauritius," a source said.

The country's divestment programme has contributed to the FDI inflow for the first time. The amount includes Rs 1,000 crore (Rs 10 billion) control premium paid by Suzuki Motor of Japan to the government for increasing its shareholding in their car-making joint venture, Maruti Udyog Ltd.

A government source said India would rely substantially on divestment proceeds to augments its FDI inflow in the coming years. So far, most of the public sectors have been acquired by domestic private firms after privatisation. Maruti has been an exception.

A bulk of the inflow, almost 30 per cent, came from further acquisition of stake in listed companies through public offers. In several cases, the subsidiaries were finally delisted, the sources added without giving details.

The officials said the April 29 meeting between the RBI and industry ministry officials to decide on the new definition of FDI was inconclusive. Another meeting will be held soon. However, more and more investors are now routing their investment proposals through the automatic route, wherever applicable.

Since an investor could go through any RBI branch in the country, the apex bank was taking time to collate the entire FDI data, the source added.