New Delhi, Nov 5 (IANS): Speaking on the issue of foreign equity in India, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley Wednesday said the government faces a major challenge in marketing reforms in the country, which has a large mass living at subsistence levels.

"In a country where 30 percent of people are living below the poverty line, your reforms cannot be one that you simply confront public opinion, or the sectors that you simply find a huge amount of reluctance for reformation," Jaitley said in Q and A session at the India Economic Summit here.

"For a government to market reforms to them is very challenging. That debate has to be continuous," he added.

Saying that the reforms process in India has to weigh the requirements of each sector, the finance minister cited the example of the defence sector where the foreign equity ceiling has been raised to 49 percent from 26 percent by the new NDAgovernment.

"This was accompanied by a big debate on the benefit (of raising FDI in defence) on Indian society and I can see the ripple effects already," Jaitley said.