 "Need sectoral strategies to enhance export competitiveness: IIPMB Director")
There is a need to develop sectoral strategies for enhancing export competitiveness, especially for electronics, engineering, pharmaceutical, and high-tech industries with a view to increase India's outbound shipments to USD 2 trillion by 2030, a trade expert said on Tuesday.
To achieve the target of USD 2 trillion in services and goods exports by 2030, India requires an export growth of 14.5 per cent per annum.
"Competitiveness across the exports value chain is the key to India's exports growth and its sustainability. In addition to generalised strategies, India needs to evolve sectoral strategies for export competitiveness, especially for engineering goods, pharmaceutical, electronics, and high-tech industries," Indian Institute of Plantation Management Bengaluru (IIPMB) Director Rakesh Mohan Joshi said.
Sectors like polished diamonds, jewellery, passenger cars, telecommunication equipment would help in increasing the shipments.
In terms of countries, tremendous unexplored potential is there in China, the UAE, Hong Kong, Germany, Vietnam, the UK, Indonesia, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, France, Italy, Thailand, Trkiye, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, and Belgium.
He said that adopting modern technology in the collection, assimilation, processing, and disseminating real-time information across stakeholders is extremely important to bridge the information gap between the exporters and the various government departments.
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Joshi also said that effective strategic response is required to ever-evolving non-tariff barriers especially by developed countries such as technical barriers, quality, sanitary and phytosanitary (related to plants and animals) requirements, sustainability, and labour issues in bilateral and multilateral negotiations, besides taking effective remedial measures at the domestic front.
"India needs to closely monitor the re-emergence of protectionist policies in the developed countries such as the Chips Act to facilitate semiconductor manufacturing in the US and the European Union," he added.
Further, Joshi suggested to harness emerging international opportunities and realise India's full potential as a service centre of the world, it needs to cautiously negotiate and monitor its free trade agreements (FTAs) wherein trade barriers in the service sector are increasingly becoming uncertain and restrictive with transparency issues and implementation challenges.
He added that to increase value realisation in merchant exports, India needs to climb up the value chain with higher value addition and branding for international markets.
Presently, India's high technology exports as a percentage of total manufactured exports are merely 10 per cent compared to 71 per cent in the case of Hong Kong.
"India should focus on innovation with R&D with a clear focus to raise the value chains targeted at capturing high-end international markets," he said, adding that there is a need for special emphasis on facilitating online transactions as global e-commerce is likely to touch USD 2 trillion by 2025.
To unleash the full potential for digitally delivered services exports, India needs to cautiously evolve new legal frameworks for the governance of digital services delivery in areas such as cross-border education and training, gaming, business outsourcing, telecom transactions, a host of business services across digital platforms and international online commerce.
IIPMB is an institute that contributes to the agri, plantation, horticulture, and allied sectors from various dimensions like education, export facilitation, capacity building and training, policy research, research and development.