The government Friday said it has taken a series of measures to reduce dependency on Chinese goods and increase the manufacturing capacity of domestic industries and their competitiveness.
Replying to supplementaries on India-China trade relationship in the Rajya Sabha, commerce and industry minister Piyush Goyal said India’s trade deficit, which was $1 billion with China in 2003-04, rose to $36 billion in 2013-14. “The entire country, in a way, became a large marketplace inviting substandard, opaquely priced, non-transparent valued goods into the country in a big measure because of which our imports increased from $4 billion in 2003-04 to $51 billion in 2013-14… we opened ourselves to a large number of dependencies on China, which we have suffered over the years as the economy grew and the country prospered,” he said.
Highlighting that the government has introduced Rs 1.97 lakh crore production-linked incentive schemes for semi-conductors and 24 other sectors to promote manufacturing, make it competitive and start reducing imports from China, he said: “It is important that we realise that our country has become depend on a country which has inimical interest and how this government has, through a number of initiatives today, focussed its attention on promoting Make in India”.
He said India used to import almost 100% of its mobile phones with only two plants making mobiles. “Thanks to the PLI scheme, we have over 200 companies in the mobile phone ecosystem and we are now not only producing for India but we are a large exporter of mobile phones,” Goyal said.