Stand on stockholding helped us: Nirmala Sitharaman

NEW DELHI: Commerce and industry minister Nirmala Sitharaman told ET that the Indian government’s consistent stand in the face of every request for going back on its view on public stockholding finally swung matters in India’s favour. “Ever since this issue came up on July 2, this government has been very consistent in saying that we don’t consider the Bali round agreement very fair when it comes to public stockholding,” she said.

The minister said that considerable persuasion had been employed by other signatories to the Bali round to get India to rethink its stance, including at every possible bilateral level meeting attended by her and Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Sitharaman herself very forcefully made the point on the importance of public stockholding to the government, at a G20 trade ministers meet a few months ago, just days before the WTO meeting in Geneva on July 2.

“We were, however, very clear that while we may be very efficient in pinpointing exactly how many Below Poverty Line (BPL) people were there in India or even in storing our food grains, but we needed our food resources to ensure that the poor are not deprived,” she said.

“We followed it up with several announcements which were there in the budget for trade facilitation, like modernising ports, easing customs and excise norms, warehousing. This helped our constant narration that we were, as a government, not against trade facilitation at all,” she added.

The clearing of the Food Security Act by the previous government, she said, made it a situation where a“Chhattisgarh like state” existed in the entire country. “Where we would be looking at up to 90% of poor being fed through government procurement and distribution,” she said. “For that reason we could not wait for 2017 to secure the interest of the poor, and we were not sure the speed at which our levels of public stockholding would be decided once trade facilitation was through,” she added.

The Modi government considers this breakthrough a triumph of its economic hard bargaining and diplomatic push.