2024-01-08 15:27:31
“The EU (FTA) being 27 countries will take more time (but) the UK can be done quickly but there are a few ticklist issues,” he said.
According to the government, India-UK free trade agreement talks completed 13 rounds of negotiations that took place from 18 September to 15 December. The fourteenth round of negotiations are expected to begin this month.
When asked for a timeline, Goyal said that one can never put a deadline to an FTA.
“You have to look at 50 years, you have to crystal gaze into the future, carefully analyse and assess and never do an FTA in a hurry,” he said. “Do it smart. That doesn’t mean you cannot do it fast. You can do it smart and fast, but don’t do it in a hurry till you are very sure about all your data, all your inputs, your protections, your offensive interests, your defensive interests.”
Goyal said that other countries too such as Oman, Peru and Chile were also courting India to sign an FTA but the minister said that currently India did not have the bandwidth to take these on at the moment.”If I talk to any foreign minister, the first thing they say is we want to do an FTA,” he said. “Russia also wants to do an FTA. So everybody wants to do an FTA with us.”The minister also spoke about how he felt ‘scorching growth’ in exports was not sustainable and that he told his team that they should be modest in their expectations and give it time to cool off.
“In only two years, (exports have gone) from $500 billion to $776 billion,” he explained. “It is 55% growth in only two years. Such scorching growth is not possible to continuously sustain. You need to cool off, you need to stabilize your numbers, you need to stabilize your supply side.”He said that this year, a lot of commodity prices fell, including petroleum and hence some element of the fall in India’s exports is also due to commodity prices. However, he said this has been made up with other value-added products like smartphones.
“This year we had at least $5-6 billion worth of (exports in) smartphones,” he said. “Apple alone will be $5 billion of exports, probably by the end of the year. So, in terms of foreign trade, we are doing very well.”
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