Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal on Thursday said India’s bilateral trade deal with the US would protect all sensitive interests of the country, asserting that people would celebrate the agreement once its details are made public.
He said that the opposition parties who are criticising the agreement lack understanding and knowledge about the subject.
“The US free trade deal is sometimes sought to be politicised by a few elements… because of lack of understanding and lack of knowledge. Details are not yet fully out…I do not know what they (opposition parties) criticise.
“But I have the courage of conviction to announce boldly that the US trade deal, once details are out, the people of India will celebrate that not a single sensitive interest of our commerce or any stakeholder has been compromised. On the contrary, India will stand at a very strong comparative advantage and trade is about comparative advantage,” Goyal said here at the ISID-IDRA national conference.
India and the US, in February, announced finalisation of the framework for the first phase of the bilateral trade agreement (BTA). However, changes in the tariff landscape in the US have led to further negotiations on the pact.
India is seeking lower tariffs for its goods in the US market than its competitor nations such as Bangladesh, Vietnam and Cambodia.
Goyal also said that India walked out of the RCEP (Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership) agreement as it could have severely impacted India’s manufacturing sector.
India in November 2019 decided not to join the mega free trade agreement RCEP as the pact was not addressing its concerns.
The RCEP members included 10 Asean members (Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam) and their six free-trade pact partners Australia, China, India, Japan, South Korea and New Zealand.
RCEP would have been a death knell for manufacturing in India, he said, adding that the pact could have turned India into “a nation of salesman and salesgirl, marketing Chinese goods in India”.
