Industry must adopt international quality standards and scale up production to remain globally competitive: Piyush Goyal

In order to promote the Make in India program, industry must adopt international quality standards and scale up production to remain globally competitive, Mr Piyush Goyal, Minister of Commerce and Industry and Railways, Govt of India, said. Speaking at 'DPIIT-FICCI Partnership Forum on Public Procurement for Make in India', organised by FICCI and DPIIT, Mr Goyal said, "We will have to align ourselves with the world standards. We want imports to be curbed and international quality standards have to be adopted both for domestic industry and imports."

Highlighting the US-China trade dispute, Mr 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 see the business opportunities to exploit." He urged the industry and DPIIT to identify the bottlenecks acting as deterrent so that Make in India can be successful. He also urged the industry, especially 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," Mr Goyal added.

Commerce & Industry 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." Mr Goyal also stressed upon 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.

Mr Goyal said that the government has identified few champion sectors like textiles, fisheries and IT, to expand and become a world leader in exports. He added that 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 added. He further highlighted that in order to promote the domestic industry for high quality products, government will layout roadmap to phase out imported manufactured goods. To further promote the business and reduce bottlenecks, Mr Goyal said that industry should also become whistle blowers. "I want more of you (industry) to become whistle blowers and we want to change all this," he added.

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