Union Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal today said India’s manufacturing capacity serves both domestic and global needs and that, in the sectors identified by the G20 Presidency, the country does not have structural excess capacity.
Addressing the concluding day of the G20 Trade Ministers’ Meeting in Milwaukee, the US, Goyal said India was the fastest-growing large economy in the world, with a domestic-demand-driven economy serving 1.4 billion people. He said India was also building manufacturing value chains from design to finished goods as a trusted link in global supply chains.
Goyal said India shared the concerns of several members that trade-distorting support in some economies could lead to dumping and predatory pricing. Such concerns, he said, should be addressed through WTO-consistent measures, including anti-dumping and countervailing duties based on evidence and subject to judicial review.
He emphasised that industrial capacity in itself was not the issue, but distortions could arise when geographical concentration of production was driven by hidden subsidies and other forms of support.
Diversification of production and supply chains was a legitimate objective, Goyal said, but it could not be used as a pretext for measures outside WTO rules or for shifting the burden of adjustment onto developing countries, which must retain policy space to industrialise. He also said the sharing of statistics and data should take place through existing mechanisms.
On updating the Most-Favoured-Nation (MFN) principle, Goyal said India’s trade with G20 members depended on a transparent, non-discriminatory and rules-based trading system. MFN treatment, he said, was a key guarantee of this system, ensuring that the same terms applied to the smallest trader as well as the largest.
He emphasised that consensus remained central to the WTO and that special and differential treatment must be preserved to enable developing countries to catch up with developed economies. He also called for the restoration of the two-tier dispute settlement system.
