INDIA & AFRICA COOPERATION IN LOGISTICS

Speaking at the inaugural session of the 17th CIIEXIM Bank Conclave on India-Africa Growth Partnership, the Union Minister of Commerce & Industry, Consumer Affairs, Food & Public Distribution and Textile, Shri Piyush Goyal mentioned that India plans to strengthen its partnership with Africa in the areas of Solar Power, defence trade & military exchanges, physical & digital infra and healthcare & pharma.

- Surbhi Arora

He also mentioned that India and Africa can work together to bring cost-effective solutions in several areas like drinking water logistics, healthcare education, Fintech and solar power among others too.

India and Mauritius signed the Comprehensive Economic Cooperation and Partnership Agreement (CECPA) on 22nd February, 2021, which entered into force on 01 April 2021. The CECPA is the first trade Agreement signed by India with a country in Africa. The Agreement is a limited agreement, which covers Trade in Goods, Rules of Origin, Trade in Services, Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT), Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) measures, Dispute Settlement, Movement of Natural Persons, Telecom, Financial services, Customs Procedures and Cooperation in other Areas.

CECPA provides an institutional mechanism to encourage and improve trade between India and Africa. The CECPA between India and Mauritius covers 310 export items for India. As regards trade in services, Indian service providers have access to around 115 subsectors from the 11 broad service sectors.

India and Mauritius through diplomatic channels have notified each other about their acceptance of the inclusion of the General Economic Cooperation (GEC) chapter and Automatic Trigger Safeguard Mechanism (ATSM) by amendment of the India-Mauritius CECPA. Let us look at the Bilateral Trade between India and SubSaharan Africa over the years:

Indian-African trade reached USD 89.5 billion in the fiscal year that ended on March 31, 2021, up almost 60% from the previous year. In 2022 (January 2022-November 2022), bilateral trade between India and South Africa reached around US$ 17,981 million.