Speaking at Public Affairs Forum of India’s PAFI’s 10th Annual Forum 2023 in New Delhi on Thursday, Dhawan, also the Founding Chairperson of Ashoka University, said the labour-intensive sectors will create a lot of jobs in the country and so should get priority.
“India is a $3.5-trillion economy and the world economy is almost 30 times larger than us. So every country that’s grown rapidly and has grown in exports is because the world market is much larger than the home market . We’re right now targeting a global goods exports share of 5% by 2030 and 10-12% by 2040,” said Dhawan, also the Founder-CEO of The Convergence Foundation.
The 10th Annual Forum 2023 is being held on October 26-27.
Dhawan said in order to increase exports, India has to go into mission mode. The country can acquire a larger global market share in labour-intensive sectors such as electronics, home interiors, toys, pharma and chemicals.
Beyond this, he said India is doing well in service exports, and is well poised to contribute to AI and other emerging technologies and turn them into revenue streams. “So we have to prioritise exports, and particularly labour-intensive exports because lots of jobs will get created here and the supply chain will come with that,” he said.Adding to the discussion on factors going to help the economy, Dhawan said SMEs are a huge engine for job creation. “Even among the over 60 million SMEs in India, there are 345 million jobs and that’s only going to grow and create more jobs. We need to focus on helping SMEs with credit. I do think most countries have had a very robust credit guarantee mechanism provided by their government — China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, you name it. I think India needs to look at something like that, and obviously at building stronger market linkages for these SMEs,” he added.
