Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal on Monday said that the government is focussing on maintaining quality in Indian products, and to ensure this, practical quality standards would be introduced to strengthen manufacturing competitiveness and to protect consumers.
Addressing an industry body event organised by FICCI, Goyal said that the consumer industry in the country, FMCGs and other products have been impacted by indiscriminate low quality products, adding that India's imports from a certain geography (hinting at China), had widened the trade deficit enormously, thus weakening domestic manufacturing.
The minister asked manufacturers, FMCG providers and consumers to work collectively to revive Indian domestic manufacturing in terms of scale by ensuring high quality at competitive prices.
In this, the FMCG sector should be a major driver of economic growth in India, Goyal added, urging consumers to foster respect for domestic products and Indian producers.
Focus on domestic quality will stop the influx of low quality products into the country, the minister noted further. Goyal said that when India liberalised its economy, a number of foreign companies and foreign suppliers entered the country, with some of them manufacturing in India.
Many of them, he said, had imported goods into India. "That should have been a period where quality Indian manufacturing at scale had to be strengthened. (But) I think we lost out by allowing a lot of indiscriminate, low quality, low cost goods coming into the country," he rued.
"The government over the last few years has focussed its energies on bringing back the building blocks to get manufacturing into India again and it's going to be a long haul," he added.
Goyal stressed on the importance of buying products which ultimately provided jobs, which will not only strengthen countries which are inimical to India's interests, but also strengthen India's economy, will have more people become consumers and help boost the virtuous cycle that of investments in India, money spent in India, leading to jobs in India, incomes for the people of India, who then become consumers.