New Delhi, Sep 20 (IANS) All the efforts that were taken to promote the ‘Make In India’ programme have started yielding results, Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal said on Saturday.
The minister, while addressing an event on “Celebrating 10 Years of Make in India’ said that we are all in mission mode to make it easier to do business in India, to promote manufacturing in India, to support trade and industry, business and commerce, including international trade.
Goyal stated that by doing so, we can see faster growth in the country, indicating the recent GDP growth rate in the first quarter of this fiscal year.
“Anybody in the room would imagine we would grow 7.8 per cent in this first quarter? It beat all economists’ expectations, and we’ll continue to beat them right up to 2047,” the minister highlighted.
The commerce minister underlined that it’s a race to make India a $30-$32 trillion economy when we celebrate 100 years of Independence.
Hitting out at previous governments, Goyal said, in the past, once the roads were clogged, then the infrastructure was built, once the ports were overburdened, then new ports were built, and once airports ran out of capacity, then we started planning a new airport.
“Now Jewar is coming up next month, whereas we still have capacity in the New Delhi airport. We are anticipating growth,” the minister stated.
By the end of this month, the new airport in Mumbai will start opening up a plethora of opportunities for the state of Maharashtra and for that whole region, he added.
The minister highlighted the outcome of his recent two-day visit to the UAE.
“We just came back, many of us in this room were in the UAE for the last two days (September 18-19), where more than 75 industry leaders across the sectors – textiles, marine fisheries, pharmaceuticals, leather goods – all of them converged,” Goyal said.
He said that it was a fruitful event and the excitement in the Gulf region for India, particularly in the UAE, was palpable.
“I really can see a lot of potential in that initiative, in that region. We have crossed a $100 billion bilateral trade between the UAE and India after the FTA,” Goyal noted.
“And in this visit to the High-Level Task Force on Investments, we have reset our target that in the next three to four years, we will do $100 billion of non-oil, non-precious metal trade with the UAE,” he said.
The minister informed that the ‘Bharat Mart’ is coming up by early 2027, which will give MSMEs an opportunity to showcase their products, have a warehousing facility, and have quick logistics from there, to be able to supply across the globe.
–IANS
aps/uk
