India seeks to bolster Central Asia trade ties
New Delhi: External Affairs Minister (EAM) S Jaishankar has urged the India-Central Asia Business Council to recommend a roadmap for further deepening of India-Central Asia ties in trade, economic and investment.
Addressing the Business Council meeting in the national capital, EAM Jaishankar highlighted three broad objectives for strengthening the economic partnership — deepen existing cooperation, diversify the trade basket and introduce sustainability and predictability in economic interactions.
'One, is to deepen the existing cooperation both in terms of volume and in terms of quality. There is already I think a recognition in each others countries and each others economies of the players and of the products. But, we must build further on that foundation and a very good example here is actually the pharmaceutical sector,' he told the gathering.
'Two, we need to diversify our trade baskets so that all of us have more options and we have more competition and in a way we are looking for new opportunities. I would like our friends from central Asian economies to appreciate that an economy today which is in excess of $4 trillion, which is growing at 6-8 per cent annually, it will create new demands for products, for services and even I would say in a way new demands out of more prosperous lifestyles,' EAM Jaishankar emphasised.He also stressed on the need to introduce greater sustainability and more predictability in economic interactions.
'That means more long-term contracts and arrangements, cross investments, joint ventures and certainly sectors like energy whether we are talking uranium, whether we are talking crude oil even potentially gas, whether we are looking at mining, If you are talking about coal or if you are discussing fertilizers, I think these are all relevant examples to reach really long term understatings between us,' the foreign minister highlighted.India's trade and economic ties with Central Asia over the last decade have shown a very strong positive trend. Mutual trade was less than $500 million a decade ago in 2014.
Today, 'what we have collectively is actually a trade volume which is almost touching $2 billion.
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