Union Minister for Commerce and Industry Piyush Goyal, while addressing the CII Partnership Summit 2023 here, said that world problems can be solved by leveraging friendships and partnerships.

Addressing the event on Monday, Goyal said: “It is a time to leverage friendships and partnerships to solve the many problems that the world is facing today.”

He said that amid the challenging times, when the world has barely come out of COVID and the economies have slowed down leading to raised inflation and deep recession in many parts of the world, meetings like these are useful to have conducive solutions to global challenges and problems.

“We are looking for resilient, distributed and stable sources of growth supply chains and are seeking greater market access with minimizing the exposure of risk that many of our economies are facing,” he said.

Quoting Prime Minister Narendra Modi, he added, “only partnerships will get us to achieve our goals,” while adding that all of us will have to look at innovative ideas, new ways of doing our work more efficiently, more effectively.

“Our startup ecosystem reflects that innovative spirit. India, which barely had three or four unicorns seven years ago, today has over 100 unicorns and India’s startup ecosystem is the third largest in the world,” he said.

Speaking on India’s partnerships with the world economies, Goyal said that we are entering into international agreements with several countries to enable our businesses as we will enable businesses around the world.

“We will engage deeply with each other so that we can become a larger player on the international global economic front,” he said.

India today offers many competitive advantages over other competing economies, Goyal said, adding that the country is focusing more on high quality of goods as well as leveraging economies of scale.

Speaking on digitalisation, he mentioned that the country is developing its digital promise in the form of digital public goods for the use of the rest of the world and said that Singapore and India have partnered on UPI, hoping to do the same with UAE in near future.

“We are expanding rupee trade with several countries, many of which are at an advanced stage of dialogue and finalization,” he said.

Speaking on technology partnership, Goyal stressed the importance of skill mapping. “We will find certain nations with tremendous skills and match that with the skill deficit,” he said, adding that matchmaking is critical in partnerships.