Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal on Tuesday said that India’s current account deficit (CAD) is manageable as it is doing well in services exports. He said that the import numbers of the country are correlated with exports as much of the imported goods are shipped back after value addition. “Our services exports are significant. It is an increasingly growing surplus. So if I have a trade deficit of USD 250-300 billion, almost USD 175-200 billion get made up by services exports. So the net CAD is still in the one per cent of GDP category, which I do not think is a matter of serious enough to be concerned about,” he said at an event here. The country’s CAD widened marginally to USD 9.7 billion or 1.1 per cent of the GDP in April-June 2024 against USD 8.9 billion or 1 per cent in the year-ago period. A current account deficit occurs when the value of goods and services imported and other payments exceed the value of the export of goods and services and other receipts by a country in a particular period. “A lot of our imports are directly co-related to our exports. So when you look at the number of months of imports, you need to calibrate that,” he said. Citing examples, he said if India is importing USD 30 billion worth of gems and jewels, it is directly adding value and being exported worth about USD 37 billion. Similarly, the USD 15-17 billion of mobile phones that India is going to export, USD 10-12 billion of imported components are coming. There are only 3-4 things that India is really import-dependent – edible oil, crude oil, coking coal required for the huge amount of steel that India produces, and a little bit of thermal coal for the port-based coal plants. “Though I think we have enough coal in India, at some stage we can even do away with that,” he said. Goyal also said that India is the world’s largest recipient of remittances and last year, it was about USD 125 billion and is growing every year. “Even during COVID, when one could have thought remittances would fall, it continued to grow. So that’s a very stable pool of money coming into the country, irrespective of anything else,” he said while talking about the strong forex reserve of the country. On a question that it takes about 6-8 months for FIIs to bring in money into India, the minister said India has benefitted from being a cautious country in attracting foreign investment. “There has never been a charge on India that we have got bad money into the country. We are also very conscious that we have a little bit of a liberalised way to move money out. A company I think can move out four times its net worth out of the country to invest in other countries or projects,” he said. India has also made it sure that money coming into the country is not hot money or being round-tripped. He, however, added that there could be some bureaucratic hurdles, which if flagged can be taken up with the finance ministry and regulators “to see how we can bring that time down”. He added that the way it can happen is “if you can influence the American SEC and the European regulators to accept Indian companies who are cleared by SEBI to invest in the US, we could look at a MRA (mutual recognition agreement) or a mutual arrangement by which both sides can accept each others licences. “It cannot be a one-way traffic,” he said adding gone are those days when one used to accept that the American systems were good and the Indian system was open to scrutiny. That is history and now India works on reciprocity, he said. Without elaborating, he added that Europe was asking for an unfair kind of situation which India did not accept. “Our focus is going to continue to remain on equality or reciprocity but maintain the sanctity of money coming into the country. But still I am happy to look to cut the KYC process or eliminate some of the unnecessary stuff which delays money coming in,” Goyal said. Further, he said that Indian firms find it “very” difficult to do business in Europe. Sometimes if a business wants to restructure or close down, “it’s near impossible” to do in that part of the world, the minister said adding people talk about ease of doing business in India, “I think their biggest stress is the problems of doing business in Europe or in many parts of the developed world”. He added that companies like ArcelorMittal were struggling in many parts of Europe and Tatas have also gone through severe stress in the UK in the investments they made over there. “In fact, they pull down Tata Motors and Tata Steel after the Corus and Jaguar buyouts,” he said adding “Indians have become a little vary of investing in these geographies”.Nominations for ET MSME Awards are now open. The last day to apply is November 30, 2024. Click here to submit your entry for any one or more of the 22 categories and stand a chance to win a prestigious award.
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