Economy bouncing back with exports, power consumption recovering, says Goyal

The Indian economy is showing signs of a bounce-back from the Covid-19 related disruptions with goods exports in July 2020 reaching about 90 per cent of that in July last year, Commerce & Industry Minister Piyush Goyal has said.

Power consumption too, is back to near normal, with the latest figures only a marginal 2-3 per cent lower than the comparable period in the previous year, the Minister said at the launch of the United Nations Industrial Development Report 2020 on Tuesday.

“Our exports have almost reached last year’s July level with 90 per cent of our exports of July 2019 having come back. If we were to remove oil related exports, where we are largely only a small value adder, importing crude oil, processing and exporting we are 95 per cent-plus on the revival of our exports,” he added.

India’s exports contracted for the fourth straight month in July 2019, with shipments falling by 12.41 per cent to $ 21.91 billion due to fall in top export items such as petroleum, textiles, engineering goods, and gems and jewellery items.

The Minister’s comment indicates that export figures for July 2020, which will be officially announced mid-August, will also post a fall vis-a-vis last year, but the decline will be lower than that experienced in the previous months.

Goyal said that the country today was in a mood to not only bring back economic activity but also become self reliant, improve quality of its products, bring about competitive pricing of the products, building economies of scale and compete with rest of the world on equal and fair terms. “... that will make Indian products not only a fair proposition but preferred proposition,” he said.