But there is a form of diplomacy that never ever shows up in a joint communiqué, but is more effective than the plenary session itself: the series of 30-minute bilateral huddles between finance ministers during the coffee breaks of a meeting of G20 finance ministers. It was exactly what happened this week in Asheville, North Carolina, where Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman went through a jungle of meetings with the World Bank's, IMF's, European Commission's and the heads of Poland, Qatar and Russia.

Each of the conversations, read one at a time, sounds like a normal conversation, an appreciation here, a discussion there. Together, they draw a picture that is more interesting: a government which, rather than merely discussing the abstract nature of policy, actively goes on a capital shopping spree, seeking capital, technology partnerships and market access at a time when India requires all three.

The timing matters. The country is setting up for the second half of a fiscal year for which its own central bank has forecast growth at 7.6 percent the fastest among major economies while the IMF's latest forecast remains around 7.3 percent before it slows down to 6.4-6.6 percent in the next two years. Those rates seem strong when compared to a global growth rate just over 3 percent and a Chinese economy that's barely moving at 4.4 percent. Growth rates, however, do not finance ports, transmission lines or semiconductor fabs and that's what Sitharaman's meetings were subtly designed to fill.

The World Bank Group President Ajay Banga's conversation is the most evident one. New Delhi is pushing for the MIGA to expand its presence in India through its guarantee instruments to strengthen corporate, infrastructure, and municipal bond markets and to attract private capital which has remained on the sidelines of India's infrastructure development. This is no new dream but the focus has been sharpened.

The Indian municipal bond market is still a small fish compared to the Indian banking system, and the struggle to make institutional investors in the global market more familiar with the credit of the sub-sovereign state is a perennial problem. The guarantee backed push by MIGA is in addition to the Development Policy Financing worth $1.5 billion provided by the World Bank, which Sitharaman thanked Banga for processing in rapid time, indicating a shift in Delhi's focus from the bilateral loans to institutionalizing access to patient capital. During the same meeting, discussions were held on the support of the International Finance Corporation (IFC) on MSMEs via SIDBI, and developing a Global Digital Public Infrastructure Knowledge Hub in India, which was proposed as an attempt to replicate and export the Aadhaar-UPI stack as a template for use by other developing economies, with agriculture identified as a possible early use case.

The tone was validating, not transactional, as IMF chief Kristalina Georgieva is said to have lauded India's macroeconomic track record, whereas the substance was pointed. Sitharaman called for “more evidence based surveillance frameworks” which better “reflect the structural shift in the emerging and developing economies”, a diplomatic way of suggesting that the Fund's growth models continue to fail to reflect the economy's shift since the numbers were last updated due to India's increasing formalisation, digital payments and widening tax base.

It's an on-going complaint of the Indians on these forums that the assumptions on which multilateral surveillance is conducted are outdated and that a more balanced reading would mean India's hand would be in a better place in credit rating decisions, capital allocation decisions and so on by the very institutions that are doing the surveillance.

The European Commission conversation with Commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis served as a lifeline to the long-running process to complete the India-EU Free Trade Agreement and Investment Protection Agreement, as well as the Trade and Technology Council mechanism to align Europe and India on semiconductors, clean energy and critical minerals. The more significant part of the negotiation may be the parallel discussion of diversified and resilient supply chains, which is as much a cover for possible over-dependence on one country as boilerplate.

There is also the geopolitical coloration below the economic layer. The meeting with the finance minister of Poland, who called India a high-level trading and investment partner, comes as part of ongoing talks with Anton Siluanov of Russia on the New Development Bank, while India's trade ties with Washington are under pressure from tariffs placed on a slew of Indian goods this year, some reaching as high as 50 percent. The finance ministry's hedging across blocs is complete now, with Qatar in the running for a spot as a governor at the AIIB meeting in next year's capital, Doha, and South Korea on the list of talks, the US, the Gulf, the EU and the BRICS-friendly institutions are all in the mix, not the sequence.

None of these results make for sensationalist publicity and that's what they're supposed to do. Communiqué diplomacy is acts of theatre, sideline diplomacy is management of inventory. What Asheville demonstrates is a financial ministry that sees every chance of the G20 as a chance to get something done, whether it's a guarantee facility, a tweak on the surveillance methodology or a trade negotiation kept alive, instead of waiting for a single grand-bargain.

Whether that patient method translates to real capital investments and signed deals, will only be apparent in bond issuance figures and FDI figures, months from now, not in any minister's press release. Though the direction of travel is clear: India not longer wants to be complimented for its growth rate. It desires the piping that transforms that rate of growth into financed infrastructure.