The Indian economy is a “bright star” in an otherwise gloomy situation globally, Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal said Monday.
Addressing a CII event on renewable energy, he also said that efforts should be made to maintain the entire supply chain of this sector in India and not allow a situation like the pharma sector where “our northern neighbour almost took away the entire industry”. The minister said that the Covid-19 pandemic has “taught us that we have to be self-sufficient in the sources of renewable energy”.
Drawing a parallel with the pharma sector, he said: “Key starting materials and API were made in India but some countries particularly our northern neighbour almost took away the entire industry by making ie competitive and giving all sorts of sops, inviting our Indian companies to manufacture in that country and have today become leading suppliers of equipment in the renewable energy space. We should not allow a situation like that to happen in our renewable energy sector and maintain the entire supply chain in India to the best of our ability,” he said.
Goyal said that in the past, India has had high imports of both machinery, equipment required for the renewable energy sector and for the traditional power sources, and in products like oil and coking coal which continue to the day.
“Prices of these products have been prone to the geopolitical uncertainties that the world has faced. We have seen how commodity prices have seen huge swings many times in the past,” he said.
Noting that there is a huge opportunity in pushing the growth of the renewable energy industry and become a global supplier, he said that energy security has to be looked as an integral part of national security and in the current context of geopolitics that the world is facing, it is economic security.
“Because of a geopolitical problem in a third country or when you’re not at all a player at all but you land up first suffering as an economy and which in some sense also has ramifications on our national security,” he said, adding that self-sufficiency has a twin advantage- sustainability and economic security.
He said India has tremendous potential to make a big difference to herself and the world’s future, both on sustainability and self-reliance on energy and the energy security of other countries who “are all now facing severe stress and have over the last two-three years, suffered the consequences of the pandemic and then the war”.