Minister of Railways, Commerce & Industry, Consumer Affairs and Food & Public Distribution Shri Piyush Goyal said that India will be playing a much greater role in the post pandemic world in creating resilient supply chains. Speaking at the India Global forum, he said that we are looking at a greater degree of engagement with countries that are democratic in their political system with which we can relate& trust as a partner. He added that India is working towards greater engagement with countries with which we have a shared ecosystem, countries which believe in transparent rules based trading mechanisms. He said that India is talking to UK, Australia, Canada and EU for trade related matters, and is keen to speed them up.

Shri Goyal said that our trusted partners can look for a greater role for India, and we are opening our doors wider. The Minister said that we are looking at investments, technology, high quality goods, equipment, machinery. “We will be looking at providing high quality technology support to our services & IT sector”.

Shri Goyal said that India has tried in WTO to promote a waiver on TRIPS so that vaccines & other medicines can be available to everyone across the world. He said that it is unfortunate that some European countries are not supporting the initiative and have preferred profit over prudence.

Shri Goyal said that we are confident that India will continue to maintain precautions & COVID protocols. He said that we are going to maintain our safeguards & masks. The Minister highlighted that despite being a developing nation, India has already crossed about 340 million vaccines. “We are currently doing 5 million a day which we hope to ramp up further in the days to come. We are happy to share our learnings with other countries. Our COWIN app through which we have done the vaccination programme has been a remarkable success & now large parts of the world are asking us for the COWIN app to be implemented in their countries.”

Shri Goyal said that India has done a record growth in exports in our first quarter despite the second wave of COVID. Similarly, the Railway freight from April-June 2021 is the highest ever in the history of Indian Railways,

Resilient supply chains: India seeks deeper engagement with like-minded trading partners to expand trade, technology and vaccine cooperation. India will pursue an expanded role in forming resilient supply chains by deepening trade and investment engagement with democracies that share transparent, rules-based trading norms, seeking accelerated negotiations with partners to foster investment, technology transfer, high-quality goods and services. It advocates a TRIPS waiver at the WTO to broaden access to vaccines and medicines and promotes sharing pandemic-response tools, notably offering the COWIN vaccination platform for adoption abroad, while noting export growth and strong railway freight performance as indicators of resilience.