Energizing India: KTR makes key suggestions to Centre

Telangana IT Minister KT Rama Rao on Friday made several suggestions to Union Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal regarding steps needed to be taken on a war-footing to make India a competitive economy in the post-Covid-19 world.  As per the TRS leader, these steps will “reboot and energize our economy to attract investments to our country” and so, the opportunity presented by the current scenario must be grabbed “aggressively”.

Here are the key highlights of KTR’s suggestions:

Carry out bold and essential reforms at the earliest: Imbibe all best practices in Ease of Doing Business to propel India into top 20 in the world rankings; let’s update our outdated labour laws and bankruptcy laws; and more importantly, guarantee and honour consistency in state policies to investors.

Build large self-contained industrial parks; corridors; develop world-class ITIs and polytechnics (2-4 for every state).  Capacity building in Infra and skills is vital.

Aggressively Improve our export competitiveness in priority sectors like Pharma, Aerospace, Textiles, Leather, IT and Food Processing. Some measures towards achieving this a) Active scouting of markets  b) Creating a deal better than what competing nations offer.  c) Soft loans for procuring quality machinery.  d) International training of staff.  e) Attractive incentives on exports.

Bailout for SMEs; direct financial assistance for SMEs in worst affected sectors, easy and very soft credit for others, deferment of dues, priority government orders.

Constitute an Empowered Strategy Group to identify and follow up on investment opportunities (with Central Govt, state govts, industry leaders, bankers, economists and policy experts).

If we have to compete for manufacturing opportunities, we need to scale up; economies of scale will help us with a competitive edge.

Mega industrial parks such as Hyderabad Pharma City and Kakatiya Mega Textile Park need to be promoted as projects of national importance.