Minister calls on industry to identify markets

A strategy to boost the share of services in the export basket of the country is being formulated, said Commerce and Industry Suresh Prabhu at the Services Conclave: “Serve India and the World”.

Services exports has the potential to rise faster than goods exports, he pointed out.

The Minister called on the Indian Industry to identify the markets that they wanted to export to and the Department of Commerce would work on Market Access issues there.

Prabhu was of the view that “we needed to identify new services which had tremendous export potential e.g. healthcare and financial services and within that develop new products which could be exported”.

He suggested that sectors such as IT should look at developing newer markets such as Latin America as markets such as US and Europe were becoming saturated.

He stated that with manufacturing becoming increasingly automated, it was services that would lead the country in terms of employment generation.

He pointed out that even manufacturing had a services component to it.

The Conclave was organized by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) in cooperation with the Department of Commerce, Ministry of Commerce and Industry and the Services Export Promotion Council (SEPC) in New Delhi on 19 Dec 2017.

According to Uday Kotak, Vice President, CII and Chairman, CII National Council on Services, the services sector contributed 60% of India’s GDP, 30% of India’s exports and just 30% of India’s jobs.

He was of the view that measures need to be taken to step up the share of jobs to 40%.

He felt that the service sector become the “job creation engine” for the Indian economy.

Highlighting some of the sectors which had the greatest potential for exports, he called for greater focus on sectors such as Health and Wellness, Tourism, Education, Media and Entertainment and Leisure among others.

He pointed out that India’s share of global tourist arrivals was miniscule and measures needed to be taken to reverse this trend.

Vivek Nair, Chairman, SEPC, added that the service sector was a major source of foreign exchange earnings and it had tremendous potential for growth.

While the sector accounted for 60% of India’s GDP, it lagged behind manufacturing in terms of exports – which he felt needed to be corrected.

He highlighted the sector’s potential to be a major source of employment generation in the country. fii-news.com