Willing to pay extra to build resilience in our supply chains: Goyal

Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal on Wednesday said the government is addressing supply chain issues across all sectors to build resilience, even if it involves spending "extra buck".

Addressing UNCTAD's Ministerial Roundtable on 'Towards Resilient, Sustainable, and Inclusive Supply Chains and Trade Logistics' in Geneva, Goyal said India has launched the 'Atmanirbhar Bharat' initiative to make the country self-reliant.

"We are addressing each and every supply chain sectorally to see where our vulnerabilities are, where we need to expand capacity, and we are willing to pay that extra buck to be able to have resilience in our supply chains," Goyal said.

The government has launched initiatives, like a production-linked incentive scheme to boost domestic manufacturing, and a policy to promote semiconductor production in the country.

To boost infrastructure development, he said, India has launched a trillion-dollar national master plan.

The government itself spends about USD 130 billion every year to expand domestic infrastructure, he said, adding that in this process, in the last 10 years, India has nearly doubled its port capacity, increased the number of airports from 74 to 158 and in the next 7-8 years, "we'll grow to 225 airports".

These measures, he said, have helped the country create jobs and boost capacities.

"Wherever we found a concentration of production or concentration of supply from any geography, that has been the area where we've looked at self-reliance. Clearly, we can't do anything about what's happening in the Red Sea or about these health pandemics, but self-reliance, we realised, was important," he added.

The Israel-Hamas conflict has impacted the smooth transport of trade consignments through a key sea route - the Red Sea.

India is also investing in creating a huge network of rail, road, and inland waterways, he said, adding that the idea is to create modern infrastructure to promote local industry and self-reliant manufacturing systems.

And wherever India is dealing with the rest of the world, it is looking for trusted partners, he noted.

"...but we still needed equipment, and we still needed components from all over the world, which is where we started expanding our free trade agreements, expanding trading relations with friendly countries. And therefore, we placed trust and reliability at a bigger foothold than just cost," Goyal said.

He also pointed out that least developed countries and developing countries will have to work together to deal with global issues.

Citing an example, Goyal said India is ready to share its payment system (UPI) with all countries, as it can help significantly cut down the cost of transactions and payments.

India is negotiating trade pacts with the US, European Union, Chile, Peru, New Zealand and Oman. It has already implemented agreements with Australia, the EFTA bloc, the UAE and Mauritius.