Align with world standards
Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal has told the industry to adopt international quality standards and scale up production to remain globally competitive.
International quality standards must be adopted both for domestic industry and replacing imports, he said at a ‘DPIIT-FICCI Partnership Forum on Public Procurement for Make in India’ on 17 Feb 2020.
“We will have to align ourselves with the world standards,” stressed the Minister.
Highlighting the US-China trade dispute, Goyal said, “There are sectors in which India has competitive advantage and let us start looking at scale.
“Commerce ministry and DPIIT should identify these sectors and make it publicly available to exploit business opportunities” in the fall off from the US-China trade dispute.
DPIIT (Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade) to identify bottlenecks that are deterrent to the success of ‘Make in India’.
He also urged the industry, especially Public Sector Undertakings (PSUs) and large companies to start paying advance to vendors at the time of delivery of goods which will help the MSME sector.
“DPIIT should identify 100 PSUs and 250 private companies to start the process and we will monitor to see how many companies take it forward,” Goyal added.
The Minister also emphasised on the need to change and expand the current basket of exports to achieve the $1 trillion target.
“The basket is changing but it is not changing fast enough. Can we collectively look at changing our basket of exports to include more value-added products.
“Import substitution or exports, both are equally important,” he stressed.
Goyal called for the need to adopt latest technologies like AI and machine learning in manufacturing sector in order to become value added producers to change the basket of exports.
The government, Goyal said, has identified few champion sectors like textiles, fisheries and IT, to expand and become a world leader in exports.
“We need to identify sectors in manufacturing and services also.
“All of us should get out of the mindset of subsidies. It is decremental to India’s long-term growth,” he pointed out.
He further highlighted that in order to promote the domestic industry of high-quality products, the government will layout road map to phase out imported manufactured goods. fiinews.com