A trade deal with the United States will help push more exports, according to Indian commerce and industry minister Piyush Goyal, who recently said the government, however, will not rush into any such agreement. Allaying concerns over the coronavirus outbreak, he said India is looking to fill gaps in the global value chain through exports and exploring alternative sources of imports.
“Negotiations with the US are to India’s advantage because we have a trade surplus (with the US)… it opens up more opportunity for our exports in a big way,” Goyal said at the March 6-7 Economic Times Global Business Summit in New Delhi.
He also said trade negotiations were complex and did not want to put a time-line to concluding the talks that had initially begun as a deal to remove some of the bilateral irritants.
Instead of just a short term engagement, he said he believed India should look at a larger engagement with the United States as it offered a huge potential for many products like textiles, gem and jewellery, chemicals, medicine and pharmaceuticals.
The government does not want to repeat the mistakes of getting into ‘complex’ free trade agreements like the ones signed between 2009 and 2011, he was quoted as saying by Indian media reports.
