Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal on Friday said India continues to be a preferred FDI (foreign direct investment) destination despite soaring global interest rates. He said that interest rates rose worldwide including in the US and that led to the flow of capital back in the developed nations. "That was a period where one would have imagined a much deeper impact on the developing economies than what India witnessed, but the strength of demand in India, the strength of opportunities that people saw in India, ensured that we did not see the drastic fall that many of our other peer countries (witnessed)," Goyal said. The total FDI -- which includes equity inflows, reinvested earnings and other capital -- contracted 15.5 per cent to USD 32.9 billion during April-September this fiscal against USD 38.94 billion in April-June 2022. "We continue to have significant FDI coming in...a lot of reinvestment of earnings happened even during this period when ideally I would have though