Govt, industry should work to make India a much larger economy: Goyal

Union Minister Piyush Goyal on Friday said the government along with the industry should work on a bigger goal to make India a developed country and aspire to become a much larger economy by 2047.

If we all put our best foot forward and aspire for double-digit growth, we can be much bigger, he said addressing FICCI's National Executive Committee Meeting.

Speaking on inflation, Goyal said that over the last eight years including the current slightly elevated levels, the CAGR inflation is under 4.5 per cent through our tenure.

When the other countries have double-digit inflation, India continues at moderate 7 per cent. There is monitoring of prices by the government on a daily basis. We are looking at, in the next few months, inflation coming back within the RBI's band of 2-6 per cent," he added.

The Minister for Commerce and Industry highlighted that India has tremendous potential with a large talent pool both to encourage design manufacturing services and the manufacturing eco-system. "Manufacturing and innovation go hand in hand," he said.

Goyal stressed that RBI has been proactive in all the measures that they have taken, and it is not about only the interest rates but holistic thinking that RBI has demonstrated.

He also said that the world has huge expectations from India and the world is looking at India from a long-term perspective.

The world expectation is also that India will drive global growth, provide the talent pool that the world needs and India will power technologies both from the perspective of development and its usage. Today, it is the innovation and the spirit of enquiry that is prevalent across the country. India can become not just the back office of the world but going forward, the front office of the world, he emphasized.

The minister also said that e-commerce in India is growing and to ensure transparency to customers the government is working on democratizing the e-commerce sector. Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) is about giving customers choice - fairly and transparently. It's about giving a bigger market to sellers, and it will help in creating small entrepreneurs, said Goyal.

Sanjiv Mehta, President, FICCI said that the thrust given by the government to Aatmanirbhar Bharat is helping the industry to tide over the challenging times.