The commerce ministry on Thursday said talks for an interim free trade agreement (FTA) between India and Australia are expected to be completed soon, aimed at boosting economic ties between the two countries.
It said the final agreement, officially called the Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Agreement (CECA), is expected to be completed by the end of 2022.
The agreement covers areas such as goods, services, investments, rules of origin, customs facilitation, legal and institutional issues.
The ministry also said that a similar agreement with the United Arab Emirates is likely to be signed in March 2022.
“This new strategic economic agreement is expected to increase bilateral trade in goods to $100 billion and trade in services to $15 billion within five years of the signing of the agreement,” the ministry elaborated.
On the export target of $400 billion for this fiscal year, the ministry said India’s goods exports had reached 65.9% of the target by November.
For monthly monitoring of the achievement of the target, an Export Monitoring Desk has been set up under the Statistics Division of DGFT.
It also said that the India Pavilion at the Dubai Expo has attracted six lakh visitors in 83 days of its inauguration.
Further, the ministry in its year-end review revealed that the Government e-Marketplace (GeM) comprises a total of 31.8 lakh vendors.
“GeM has created an integrated procurement system for the country in line with the vision of the government, by bringing the functionalities of Defense Public Procurement Portal, Central Public Procurement Portal and its sub-portals on GeM to provide a single user experience,” it said.
The system will consolidate the dispersed vendor base upon publishing the portal on GeM thereby benefiting from economies of scale, better price discovery and dissemination of best practices in procurement.
On the National Logistics Policy, it said that the policy has been developed after extensive consultations with all the ministries.
A 75-point National Logistics Reform Action Plan with specific actionable items on the policy has also been prepared. The revised policy is in the final stages of approval. It aims to reduce the cost of logistics by about 5 percent over the next 5 years, achieving a ranking in the top 25 of major global logistics-related performance indices,” it added.
The ministry said that during 2021-22 till December 8, new projects have been approved by an Empowered Committee with a total Trade Infrastructure for Export Scheme (TIES) fund of Rs 113 crore.
Regarding the initiative of the Rubber Board, it said that the Board is conducting a nationwide census on rubber using a digital mobile application, ‘RUBAC’, developed in collaboration with the University of Digital, Kerala, to ascertain the area under rubber. , the newly planted area can be rebuilt. – Planted area, age profile of trees, area abandoned over the years, level of adoption of new clones, size of holding and tapper details.
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