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Will table new Manufacturing Policy by year-end: Sharma

A Manufacturing Policy envisaging setting up mega-manufacturing hubs to attract foreign investment will be placed before Cabinet by the end of this year, Commerce and Industry Minister Anand Sharma said today.

"By this autumn, by October-end, ministerial consultations on the document should be completed and by this year-end, it will be placed before the Cabinet," he said while addressing the Engineering Export Promotion Council (EEPC) National Awards for Export Excellence for 2008-09 here today.

The main objective would be to attract both sources and technologies, adopt a timely approach for induction and clearances and transparency, which would result in creating an investor-friendly 'regimen, Sharma said. He said this decade would see a wave of new technologies across the globe. "We will not wait and watch, but join hands with other countries. The need is to make India a workshop of technologies, not a country which just imports," he said.

The industry, he said, must realise its strengths and shortcomings and must look at the global picture for higher growth. "The industry has to invest in manufacturing technology and skills training... Skills training is imperative," he said.

On the impact of the global meltdown on various markets, including India, he said the recovery is on, but was "weak and uneven".

He said the government's immediate concern last year was to arrest the decline in exports and reverse the trend and so, it looked beyond traditional export destinations and gave sops for exports to 39 global markets. "This year we have added two new markets -- China and Japan -- taking the number of our export destinations (getting sops) to 41. In the first quarter of 2010-11, exports have grown by 32 per cent compared to the first quarter of the last fiscal year."

Earlier, welcoming the recently announced amendments to the Foreign Trade Policy, EEPC Chairman Aman Chadha said the new measures would help India achieve exports of $200 billion by 2011 as per the target of doubling India's exports of goods and services by 2014.

While the policy has ingredients that can help exporters withstand the slowdown in demand in global markets, there are still lingering issues, he said.

Sharma gave away 107 awards at the function, of which 11 were in the top export award categories.

Source : Business Standard