Protecting industry, not interests

The government must guard India against domestic protectionism as strongly as against Chinese dumping

- LAVEESH BHANDARI

The government recently announced anti-dumping investigations against a slew of products ranging from steel to mobile covers. Anti-dumping is a much used form of protection in India, alongside higher tariff rates, quantity restrictions, negative import lists, and more.

Some of these comply with the World Trade Organization (WTO) rules, some can be made to comply, and for others, the WTO hardly matters.

What matters, however, is the manufacturing environment India is building. If everything from steel to mobile covers to glass, PET, and solar panels needs protection, on top of the hundreds of other products already receiving some form of it, we need to ask ourselves a deeper question: What happened? And how can we change this?

One answer, the most popular one, is that China has unleashed its highly subsidised and heavily protected industrial output on the world. These products can easily overwhelm domestic production and industry, affecting employment and long-term manufacturing growth. But these anti-dumping investigations will not target only Chinese products. From information reported, it appears that the Directorate General of Trade Remedies under the Ministry of Commerce will need to investigate producers from Thailand, Russia, Taiwan, South Korea, Vietnam, and Bangladesh, among other countries. Various protective mechanisms exist as outlined above, and producers from developed countries, including Japan and the European Union, not to mention the United States, have been included.