Former NITI Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant on Tuesday said that India and New Zealand need to openly work in the agriculture sector. He stressed that New Zealand has great expertise in the agriculture productivity sector.
While speaking at the event on “Partnership Pathway: New Zealand India Economic Relations alongside New Zealand’s Minister for Trade Todd McClay, he said, “I’m a great believer that it will greatly benefit India if you were to use New Zealand’s great expertise in the field of agriculture productivities. It’s a phenomenal destination as far as agriculture product productivity is concerned.”
“It does a lot of high-value production and India is an agrarian country. Almost 40 per cent of Indians are in agriculture, but we need to increase earnings from the agriculture sector in a very big way and to my mind the real linkage movement between production to the end consumer through value-added production really holds just a key to that and there’s no better destination than learning the art from New Zealand. We need to openly work with New Zealand in this area,” he added.
Amitabh Kant noted that the National Dairy Development Board (NDDB) should work with New Zealand in the dairy sector. He said, “You know we feel very protective about our farmers as far as the dairy sector is concerned and I am very clear about this that Fonterra etc are top class company giving massive amount of value added in milk. Now, we should not feel very threatened about it.
“We should get NDDB [National Dairy Development Board] to work with them. As you know it could be a strategic partnership so Indian companies should gain from that and that will help us to get into a range of value of production in the dairy sector. Their dairy sector is the most advanced in the world and I think there’s plenty to put India to get on that,” he added.
He said that India can greatly benefit from New Zealand’s technological expertise and knowledge of kiwis. He spoke about eating fine kiwis in Arunachal Pradesh which he said were there due to a New Zealand working in partnership with Arunachal to produce kiwis.
Speaking of India doing cashless transactions, he said, “We now do paperless, cashless lending. We do paperless, cashless insurance on the go in one minute. Now these are things on which India and New Zealand must collaborate. I think that can be a win-win. I think we are more advanced than any country in the world, and yet the digital we built up a techno-economic solution where the power of data remains with the citizen.”
He said that India and New Zealand can also collaborate in the Micro, Small & Medium Enterprises (MSME). He noted that there are vast opportunities across a number of areas.
He noted, “There are several MSMEs which collaborate with New Zealand companies and I think that opportunity is massive, it’s huge and I think we need to provide greater impetus to it so that we can benefit from the technical expertise and knowledge of New Zealand and we can greatly benefit from each other’s expertise in several areas in the MSME sector.”
Additionally, he also called for collaboration between the two nations in the education sector. Kant said that New Zealand should collaborate with several Indian universities and give joint collaborative degrees. (ANI)
