India Expanding Rupee Trade With Several Nations, Talks In Advanced Stages: Goyal

India is expanding rupee trade with several countries and talks are in advanced stages, said Union Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal in Delhi. 

While speaking at CII Partnership Summit 2023, he said that Indian MSMEs are first engaging with digitalisation and as was mentioned earlier, India is developing its digital promise in the form of digital public goods for the use of the rest of the world. 

"Singapore and India have recently partnered on UPI and we hope to do the same with UAE in the near future. We are expanding rupee trade with several countries, many of which are at an advanced stage of dialogue and finalisation," he added. 

Goyal added that it is a time to leverage friendships and partnerships to solve the many problems that the world is facing today. 

"We are looking for resilient, distributed and stable sources of growth supply chains. We are seeking greater market access with minimising the exposure to risk that many of our economies are facing," he said. 

The minister pointed out that India has set an example for the world. 

He said that as a responsible global citizen, when we developed the Covid-19 vaccine, we used it not only for our own citizens, who are administered 2.2 billion vaccines free of charge but we also provided vaccines to the less developed countries to the Pacific island nations to Caribbean nations, to small island states to our neighborhood. Over 250 million vaccines were provided, most of them free of charge, to other parts of the world, he added.

Goyal said that sustainability is a way of life in India and we don’t need to be taught or to learn from other parts of the world. 

He pointed out that our green goals are very ambitious and said that Prime Minister Modi introduced the concept of sustainable lifestyles, which is the need of the hour. Because the waste that we are all generating across the world, more particularly in the developed world, is a larger cause of this big problem of climate change, than the needs of humanity. 

He said that we in India are committed to our sustainable goals and sustainable lifestyle. "We are committed to the circular economy. We are committed to eliminating waste or reuse and recycling and I invite all our partner countries to work with India, to learn from India, to partner India in this effort to make the world a better place to live," he added.

Goyal spoke on India’s partnership with the world economies. He said we are entering into international agreements with several countries to enable our businesses as we will enable businesses around the world. We will engage deeply with each other so that we can become a larger player on the international global economic front. 

He said that this effort has been led by Prime Minister Modi literally from the front line. Citing an example, Goyal said that two years ago, our exports of goods and services collectively were worth USD 500 billion dollars. 

India today offers many competitive advantages over other competing economies, the minister said. 

“We are focusing more on the high quality of goods as well as leveraging economies of scale, particularly given the large domestic market that we offer to businesses and investors who come and work in India and to our friends in their economic engagement with India,” he said.

Goyal said that when we talk about financing global economic recovery, a strong and responsive international institutional framework is called for. 

“We need to also see that some non-transparent economies, whose economic systems are totally opaque, enjoy the fruits of multilateral engagement. I think it's time the world called out such countries and made them accountable and transparent,” he added.