Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Friday said that the free trade agreement with the UK is closer, and would be very soon. While speaking at the B20 Summit India 2023, Sitharaman also said that talks with Canada on the same “may happen soon.”
This comes after UK Secretary of State for Business and Trade Kemi Badenoch on Thursday said the trade pact talks with India are in the final stages. He also said that India and the UK are “actively” discussing business mobility under the proposed FTA, and clarified that the overall visa liberalisation issues do not come under the ambit of trade pacts.
The Union Finance Minister at the B20 Summit said, India’s first quarter has gone well, and that the nation’s GDP number for the same period would be good.
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“India has showcased an accelerated pace of economic reforms in the past nine years,” she added.
“Government’s priority is to tame inflation,” Sitharaman said. Her comment came on the sidelines of rising inflation in India, led by a jump in vegetable prices.
In July, India’s retail inflation rate surged to a 15-month high of 7.44 per cent, breaching the upper limit of the 4+/- 2 per cent band of the Reserve Bank of India. RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das in MPC meeting minutes released on Wednesday said that the supply side measures need to be continued to check the spiraling of food shocks into generalised economy-wide price impulses.
In the MPC minutes, he wrote, “Headline consumer price index (CPI)-based inflation is expected to harden significantly in July-August, driven by the spike in tomato and other vegetable prices, Das wrote in the minutes.”
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RBI announced its bimonthly monetary policy on August 10, keeping the key interest rate — repo rate — unchanged for the third time in a row.
FM Sitharaman, while speaking at the B20 summit, said, “Elevated interest rates for considerable time can come in the way of economic recovery.”
“Financing climate is key factor for sustaining global economic recovery,” she said, and further added, “Green shoots of private capital expenditure upcycle can be felt now because of high budget capex.”
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The Finance Minister added, “We need to cushion us sufficiently against any possible shocks; need to diversify supply chains quickly.”