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New Delhi: Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman addresses a press conference at BJP headquarters, in New Delhi, Friday, May 17, 2024. (Photo: PTi)
India must ramp up its manufacturing sector to increase its share in global value chains and become self-reliant, with the help of government policies, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said on Friday.
“Much against the advice given by some economists that India should no longer be looking at manufacturing or ramping up manufacturing, I would like to highlight the fact that manufacturing must increase… We need to have greater sophistication in our product manufacturing,” Sitharaman said.
Speaking at the Confederation of Indian Industry’s Annual Business Summit, Sitharaman said that the government is looking at the private sector as a partner in developing initiatives and sees it playing a big role towards becoming a developed country by 2047.
The Finance Minister said that the fundamental basis for India’s consistent and steady growth was the policy stability, absence of flip-flops, and corruption-free decision-making. “We are making sure that the facilitation both in legislative and also the legal frameworks are all simultaneously going on, having heard from the industry that rapid changes are required in our compliance regime,” Sitharaman said.
She underlined that the window of India’s demographic dividend is there for the next 30 years and it comes with the added advantage of the lowest dependency ratio.
The Finance Minister highlighted the International Monetary Fund’s estimation that India would contribute 18 per cent to the global growth for five years beginning from 2023.
She said that the production-linked incentive scheme had helped in transforming the mobile and electronics sectors. “From 78 per cent import dependence in 2014, today 99 per cent of all mobiles sold in India are made in India,” Sitharaman said.
Citing iPhone maker Apple’s example, the Finance Minister said that value addition in electronics and smartphone manufacturing has grown significantly, having crossed 20 per cent from the negligible level of 2014-15. “India is becoming Apple’s second-largest manufacturing hub for iPhones outside of China,” Sitharaman said.
The Finance Minister also quoted a Capgemini Research Institute report released in May, which said India figured at the top of the list of investment destinations for senior executives in Europe and in the United States, who are looking to reduce their dependence on China and shift part of their manufacturing capacity to emerging markets.
“Sixty-five per cent of nearly 760 executives surveyed have said that they plan to increase investments significantly in India,” the Finance Minister said.
On the services sector, Sitharaman said that India commands over 50 per cent of the world’s Global Capability Centres (GCCs) and remains the most preferred destination, creating significant domestic and global opportunities.
First Published: May 17 2024 | 4:55 PM IST
