Piyush Goyal calls for increasing India's share in global trade to 10%

Union Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal on Thursday called for increasing India's share in global trade to 10 per cent and taking the country's share of exports in GDP to about 25 per cent.

Goyal was addressing the closing session of the Post-Budget Webinar on "Make in India for the World."

Speaking at the occasion, the Union Minister said "These are ambitious targets, but I think doable. Today other countries are also talking of programmes very similar to Aatma Nirbhar Bharat. And I think there can be no better endorsement of the importance and the success of this vision than the fact that the world today wants to emulate the India story."

Goyal called for taking India among the top three nations in Global Services Trade. He called for supporting MSMEs in foreign trade, besides creating top 10 research and development labs and innovation centres to position India as a leader in technology during the next 25 years.

"Let all of us become job creators, work towards strengthening India's manufacturing ecosystem in a collaborative approach," he said.

Stating that the government is looking at a more liberal regulatory regime for the Drones sector barring the defence systems, Goyal said the Industry should aim to make India become the manufacturing hub of Drones. He called for integrating quality in the full value chain and said it should not just come into the picture once the final product is made.

Underlining the need to develop technical skills of tomorrow for the industry, the Union Minister called for the need to reorient academic courses to make them relevant to the "needs of today".

"Very often, demand of time is moving very fast, change in curriculum moves much slowly, Of course, there are lot of problems, you cannot change curriculum overnight, but I think more relevant, contemporary education is equally important,... so more academic courses relevant to what you require, and for that we will need to do some research for what is being taught today and how contemporary that is," he added.