Union Minister of Commerce and Industry Piyush Goyal on Monday said the government was hopeful of significantly ramping up focus on quality over the next two-three years by bringing in reasonably strict and compulsory but practical quality standards on many products.

The objective is to ensure that Indian manufacturing was able to withstand irrational competition, increase the scale of production and become more competitive.

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Addressing a function here, he said, ”As long as we do not recognise the importance of quality in our country, we will not be able to stop this influx of low-quality products. Towards that end, the government was working to introduce quality standards in a much bigger way.”

“We have now almost four times the number of quality control orders implemented in the last few years than what we had 10 years ago,” he added.

Goyal asked manufacturers and consumers to work collectively to revive Indian domestic manufacturing at a higher scale, with high quality and at competitive prices, so that India once again provided a large number of jobs, work opportunities, and business opportunities, and met the aspirations of 1.4 billion people.

He observed that developed economies had become developed by ensuring significant internationalisation of their economies, by engaging with the world in a bigger way, by focusing on scale, so that they could be more competitive, by building their domestic logistics ecosystem, where infrastructure investments played an important role, by focusing their energies on providing what the consumer really wished for.

Goyal underscored that sustainability would drive demand in the days ahead. He noted that the government had been focusing relentlessly on sustainability across sectors

The minister noted that the consumer industry in India has have been a victim of indiscriminate low-quality imports, because of which India has suffered and Indians have suffered. He said that though India had liberalised its economy and a number of foreign companies and foreign suppliers did come into the country with some of them manufacturing in India, most of them had imported goods into India.

Goyal pointed out that India’s imports from a certain geography had widened the trade deficit enormously and contributed to weakening domestic manufacturing. ‘The government over the last few years, focused its energies on bringing back the building blocks to get manufacturing into India again and it’s going to be a long haul’, he added.

The minister said that efforts, coupled with significant investments earmarked in the budget in the last three or four years would be able to make Indian manufacturing much more competitive.