Washington: India is not seeking to reverse the benefits of globalization, but is asking that it be made more transparent, Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said Monday.
“It’s not to say that we have to reverse the benefits of globalization. It is more to say, make globalization more transparent,” Sitharaman told a prominent American think-tank Peterson Institute for International Economics in response to a question.
For a very long time, it has been India’s attempt to make sure its manufacturing sector grows. “We have a big play. We also do not import final consumer goods, which we are capable of manufacturing. However, when you have price discrepancies or price competitiveness affecting your purchasing decisions, you end up buying those which you can produce because they come at a far more, cheaper rate,” she said.
“So, Indians have always had this difficulty in having to come back to producing certain things which are your day-to-day domestic necessities, but you are unable to produce because you find cheaper imports coming or the very same requirement. But now we’ve seen that there is an opportunity that lies, from the consumer point of view, that even within India, there’s enough purchasing power. And many of these goods which can be produced in India will have a definitive large consumer base within the country,” she said.
So, catering to the domestic market itself has become now attractive for many of those producers who would not have produced such things which were otherwise available for cheap from outside, she noted.
“The phase manufacturing programs that we have come up with, have identified several such goods, which at the first stage, we would gradually incentivize producing and selling within India, then move over to a higher level of sophistication in the making of such goods. So, the domestic market itself is available for you to produce, gradually stop imports of such things which you can produce yourselves,” she said.
PTI