India looking forward to export-led growth: Govt.

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Saurabh Gupta | 12 Sep, 2008
Joint Secretary, Department of Commerce & Industry, Anil Mukim said that with a population of more than one billion, India potentially represents one of the largest market for major international producers.

And with the increasing competitiveness of the Indian industry, India is looking forward to the international market to propel economic growth through export-led growth strategy," Mukim said while addressing a workshop on 'INDO – US Commercial Dialogue: Leveraging the WTO/ TBT Agreement' organized by CII in New Delhi.

Mukim said, "Although India's share in the world's exports is low, accounting for 1.05 percent of global exports, its exports have grown at one of the fastest rate in the world, especially after the economic liberalization of the Indian Economy in 1991. India's total exports to the world tripled from $52.7 billion in 2002-03, to more than $155 billion in 2007-08."

He also expressed concern about the India and United States' multi dimensional relations ranging from political, strategic to economic and commercial. He said that Indo-US economic relations in the form of bilateral trade and investments constitute an important element in India-US bilateral relations particularly because India is now the second fastest growing economy in the world and USA is the world largest economy.

"Exports from India to US have more than doubled from $8.5 billion to $18.85 billion over the period 2001 to 2007, an average annual growth of 15 percent," Mukim said.

At the individual commodity level, the majority of the Indian exports to US is dominated by cut and polished diamonds, jewellery, and textiles and apparel. Other notable products are chemicals and pharmaceuticals, food products, iron and steel products, machinery, seafood, and auto parts. These products account for over 70% of Indian Exports to US.

Mukim said in his address that there is a need to diversify India's export basket and the government is working toward that.

"For further facilitating trade and investment between the two countries, India-US commercial dialogue was signed in March 2000. Under this programme we have also agreed to a INDO-US Standards Program," he said.

"The main objective of the programme were to gain better understanding of jurisdictional authorities and processes related to standards, to enhance the 'Made in India' brand by benchmarking domestic procedures, to address domestic procedures based on good regulatory practices can help facilitate trade and investments, and to ensure that obligations to the WTO TBT Agreement are met in a timely manner," he added.

Mukim called this workshop as a beginning and said that these workshop will continue and more aspects related to standards and conformity assessment issue will be dealt with so as to improve the Indo-US trade.

Other speakers in the session were A Bipin Menon, Deputy Secretary, Trade Policy, Dept. of Commerce, Ministry of Commerce & Industry; Dale Tasharski, Deputy Counselor for Commercial Affairs, US Embassy; Bryan O’Byrne, US Department of Commerce and Rakesh Verma, Additional Director General, Bureau of Indian Standards.