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Union Minister of Commerce and Industry, Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution and Textiles, Piyush Goyal said that the government, over the next two or three years, hoped to significantly ramp up focus on quality by bringing in reasonably strict and compulsory but practical quality standards on many more products so that Indian manufacturing can withstand irrational competition, increase the scale of production and become more competitive.
He was addressing the inaugural session of Massmerize 2023 in New Delhi today.
The minister said that as long as we do not recognize the importance of quality in our country, we will not be able to stop this influx of low-quality products. ‘Towards that end, we in the government are working to introduce quality standards in a much bigger way. We have now almost four times the number of quality control orders implemented in the last few years than what we had 10 years ago.
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Goyal asked manufacturers, FMCG providers and consumers to work collectively to revive Indian domestic manufacturing at scale, with high quality and at competitive prices, so that India once again provides a large number of jobs, work opportunities, business opportunities, and meets the aspirations of 1.4 billion people.
He opined that the FMCG sector will truly be a driver of economic growth and that moving forward, India will be an important consumer market. He called for the creation and strengthening of a virtuous circle with massive amounts of investment and focus both on the public sector and the private sector to create the necessary building blocks or infrastructure to help the Indian economy grow rapidly. He called for renewed investments in infrastructure, manufacturing, innovation, R&D and quality.
Goyal observed that developed economies had become developed by ensuring significant internationalization of their economies, by engaging with the world in a bigger way, by focusing on scale, so that they can be more competitive, by building their domestic logistics ecosystem, where infrastructure investments play an important role, by focusing their energies on providing what the consumer really wished for, good high-quality products at competitive prices and in the current context, sustainable goods.
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Goyal underscored that sustainability would drive demand in the days ahead. He noted that the government had been focusing relentlessly on sustainability across sectors
The minister noted that the consumer industry in India, FMCGs and other such products have been victims of indiscriminate low-quality imports, because of which India has suffered and Indians have suffered. He said that though India had liberalized its economy and a number of foreign companies and foreign suppliers did come into the country with some of them manufacturing in India, most of them had imported goods into India.
