Ajit Ranade: India needs more sectors to be reliable dollar earners
Live MintIndia presently has more than a quarter trillion dollars of essential imports. Domestic production capacity for all these is unlikely to become ‘ atma nirbhar ’ in the near future, even as demand will grow as India chugs at a 7% or 8% growth rate. In a report, Ajay Srivastava, founder of Global Trade Research Initiative, analysed the structural changes that have occurred in India’s export and import baskets over the past two decades. Likewise, one of India’s strongest dollar earning sectors, the export of diesel and petrol, which now accounts for a fifth of all merchandise exports, has a very high import component. Similarly, a decade ago, India was the world’s leader in the export of polished diamonds, accounting for a 90% market share by volume.