Made in India to get preference in public procurement:Official

The government is working on a policy to incentivise domestic manufacturing by giving preferential market access in public procurement to local manufacturers, a top official said today.
Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP) Ramesh Abhishek also said that the country can look forward to "a lot of FDI reforms" in this year.
To promote domestic manufacturing, Abhishek said the government would like to prescribe domestic value addition as a requirement for public procurement, as is being done for electronics items and by some other ministries.
The proposed policy, Abhishek said, is being worked on as the industry has pointed out that "many of the public procurements are being done with conditions which are discriminatory towards or against domestic manufacturing".

"We have identified a number of these practices," he said, adding that the government is working on a policy which "will not only remove any possible discrimination against domestic manufacturing but actually incentivise them by giving some preferential market access in public procurement".
Observing that foreign direct investment (FDI) is a key to boost growth, the DIPP secretary said there have been a slew of FDI reforms in the last two-and-a-half years.

"In the coming years, in this year itself, we can look forward to a lot of FDI reforms. We are seeing enormous amount of interest of foreign investors also," he said while addressing a CII conference here.

"We have not only opened up sectors, we have made processes much simpler. The result has been quite remarkable," Abhishek said.
The country has seen USD 156 billion worth of FDI in the last three financial years, and in the last financial year itself the FDI inflow will be more than USD 56 billion, he said further.
Besides, he said that unless the Centre and the states work together on creating a suitable business climate, the cost of doing business will not come down.
"We are also looking at a number of laws, regulations which come in the way of growth of startups. More than a dozen such regulations have been made or changed last year to help the startups but we have another list of such changes which need to be done and we are working on that," Abhishek said.

In the next 5-10 years India will see a lot of growth of startups, the secretary added.