India to touch $750 bn in exports in 2022-23: Goyal

NEW DELHI: Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal has said that India’s goods and services exports are set to cross $750 billion mark in the current fiscal.

He also added that talks with some countries to expand rupee trade are in final stages. Goyal said this on Monday while addressing the CII Partnership Summit in the national capital. The three-day summit got underway on Monday.

“Sustainability has been at the core of G20 agenda for several years now, the core of all multilateral and bilateral engagements over the last few years, but for India, sustainability is a way of life,” he said.

The Minister said partnerships between citizens, communities and countries, when working together in the spirit of cooperation, collaboration and sometimes competition, collectively can contribute to a more stable and prosperous future.

Dukgeun Ahn, Trade Minister of South Korea, said on the occasion that India is playing a prominent role in the IT sector, including Artificial Intelligence and Big Data, as the world’s largest source of human talent and outstanding engineers.

He observed that India has been successful in creating favourable conditions for businesses with its ‘Make in India’ and ‘Self-Reliant India’ policies, playing a pivotal role in establishing a stable global supply chain.

Abdulla bin Touq Al Marri, Minister of Economy, United Arab Emirates, said that global issues require global solutions and cannot be resolved by a single nation or a small group of nations, as they require significant concrete actions.

The UAE, he said, is dedicated towards collaborating with international partners bilaterally and multilaterally in order to tackle world problems and build a more sustainable and prosperous future for everyone.

Govt focussed on semiconductor industry: Ashwini Vaishnaw

Minister for Electronics, Railways and Telecom Ashwini Vaishnaw on Tuesday said that the government is focussing on the semiconductor industry for India. “We are talking to all stakeholders in semiconductor industry. It’s a new industry and an uphill task, but we are committed to do what is needed,” he said. Addressing the scope for growth in the semiconductor industry, Vaishnaw said that a lot of interest has been shown by stakeholders in the sector, “We should see a vibrant semiconductor industry in the next three to four years”. Vaishnaw, who was addressing the CII Partnership Summit, while commenting on developments in the telecom sector said, “Time has come where we need at least one more source in telecom sector. The world has handful of players, which is a barrier in many ways. India thus decided to make an end to end stack of telecom technology. We took that as a challenge and within two and a half years, a world class telecom stack is ready and is getting deployed as we speak. We recently tested it for 10 million simultaneous calls.” On the role of public investment in providing data connections to the most vulnerable sectors, Vaishnaw said, “Accessibility will always pose a challenge to take data connections to most vulnerable sectors, and that is where public investment has to come in. We are investing about $8 billion in providing 4G and 5G services till the last mile.”

Affordability, the minister added, is extremely important in digitisation of India. “Almost eight years back, the cost was about Rs 300 per GB of data. Now it is about Rs 14 per GB of data. It happened when we laid a clear policy framework for telecom sector. The sector is now the entry point for digitisation,” he informed. Vaishnaw further said India has opened up mass solutions such as vaccination and payment digitisation to the world, adding that these solutions are India’s contribution to the world.