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New Delhi : The Ministry of Commerce & Industry is creating an action-oriented plan which will highlight specific sector level interventions to bolster India’s march towards becoming a USD 5 trillion economy before 2025. The focused plans will be on boosting services sector contribution to USD 3 trillion, manufacturing to USD 1 trillion and Agriculture to USD 1 trillion.
The Ministry has created a corpus of USD 1 billion to boost 12 champion sectors in services and is working on releasing the New Industrial Policy keeping in mind the demands of the future. Further all efforts of both the Department of Commerce and Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion have been towards achieving the goal of India becoming USD 5 trillion economy.
The Union Cabinet chaired by the Prime Minister approved the proposal of the Department of Commerce to give focused attention to 12 identified Champion Services Sectors for promoting their development, and realising their potential. These include Information Technology & Information Technology enabled Services (IT &ITeS), Tourism and Hospitality Services, Medical Value Travel, Transport and Logistics Services, Accounting and Finance Services, Audio Visual Services, Legal Services, Communication Services, Construction and Related Engineering Services, Environmental Services, Financial Services and Education Services.
This initiative will enhance the competitiveness of India’s service sectors through the implementation of focused and monitored Action Plans thereby promoting GDP growth, creating more jobs and promoting exports to global markets. As Services sector in India has immense employment potential, it will enhance the competitiveness of India’s service sectors through the implementation of focused and monitored Action Plans creating more jobs in India, contributing to a higher GDP and exports of services to global markets.
As the Services sector contributes significantly to India’s GDP, exports and job creation, increased productivity and competitiveness of the Champion Services Sectors will further boost exports of various services from India. Embedded services are substantial part of ‘Goods’ as well. Thus, competitive services sector will add to the competitiveness of the manufacturing sector as well. The share of India’s services sector in global services exports was 3.3% in 2015 compared to 3.1% in 2014. Based on this initiative, a goal of 4.2 % has been envisaged for 2022.
The Commerce Ministry has formulated India’s first ever Agricultural Export Policy with a focused plan to boost India’s agricultural exports to USD 60 billion by 2022 thereby assisting the Agriculture Ministry in achieving its target of USD 100 billion and to integrate Indian farmers and the high quality agricultural products with global value chains and to double India’s share in world agriculture. The vision of the Agriculture Export Policy is to harness the export potential of Indian agriculture through suitable policy instruments and to make India a global power in agriculture and raise farmers’ income.
The Commerce Ministry is also working closely with the Finance Ministry to ease credit flow to the export sector, especially small exporters to ensure adequate availability of funds to them. It has identified 15 strategic overseas locations where the Trade Promotion Organisations (TPOs) are proposed to be created. India has great potential to generate greater volumes of export with these countries but at present trade with them stands at single digit numbers.
The locations where TPOs are proposed are : Astana (Kazakhstan), Beijing (China), Cape town (South Africa), Dubai (UAE), Frankfurt (Germany), Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam), Jakarta (Indonesia), Lima (Peru), London (UK), Melbourne (Austrialia), Mexico City (Mexico), Moscow (Russia), New York (USA), Sao Paulo (Brazil), and Tokyo (Japan), according to a PIB release.
India’s exports clocked highest growth in last 6 years. Sector specific interventions, focused export promotion initiatives, greater transparency and quick resolution of issues have led to an impressive export growth of 14.76 % in 2017-18 (Oct-Sept) over previous year.
The Department of Commerce is making all efforts to diversify India’s export basket regionwise and commoditywise. Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) are a means of correcting India’s balance of trade. With the USA bilateral negotiations are on and with China, India has held three inter-ministerial delegation meetings in June, August and November 2018 led by the Department of Commerce to pursue market access issues with Ministry of Commerce China (MOFCOM).