Dato' Sri Mustapa Bin Mohamed, Hon'ble Minister of International Trade and Industry, Government of Malaysia, who is on a three-day trade and investment mission to India, delivered a Special Address at the Seminar on 'India-Malaysia Trade and Economic Cooperation in the Context of Indian Economy Dynamism and India's Act East Policy', organised by Research and Information System for Developing Countries (RIS), a New Delhi based think-tank.

The Minister said that India and Malaysia have been close friends and are important trading partners. Their bilateral trade volume stands at $13.5 billion and is poised to reach much higher levels in future. He also emphasised on India-ASEAN relations and said that India has been important in bridging the gap between ASEAN members. He said that this is a crucial time for Malaysia as it has assumed the ASEAN Chair this year. Dato' Sri Mohamed emphasised on developing closer partnerships to tap the huge unrealised economic potential between India and ASEAN through greater business-to-business and people-to-people collaboration. Malaysians have been investing abroad and there are many Malaysian companies in India also. Malaysia is set to make more investment in India to contribute to 'Make in India' campaign, the Minister added. The Malaysian investment in India stands at US$ 6 billion while Indian investement in Malaysia is only at the level of $ 1.2 billion.

Sachin Chaturvedi, Director-General, RIS informed that with the change in government India is undergoing many policy changes of which four dimensions could be highlighted. These include investment, infrastructure, ease of doing business, technology & innovation and labour reforms. According to him, doing business in India would be easy with new trade facilitation measures initiated, unfolding commercial opportunities for Malaysia as well as for the entire ASEAN region.

That centre of economic gravity has shifted to Asia underlines the importance of bilateral relations between India and Malaysia, said Ram Upendra Das, Professor, RIS. He also emphasised that under cooperative and competitive federalism India will have important external dimensions to the Make in India initiative.

Rajiv Kumar, Professor, Centre for Policy Research said that India is a big country with 29 states at different levels of development. This gives any country an opportunity to choose one or two states and develop trade and economic strategy for that. He also highlighted that now, we have shifted to the era of governance and are trying hard to make India competitively attractive to investors. He also told that we are in the same situation of urban unemployment as Malaysia was in 1970s. We have to create jobs and for this we need as much investment as possible.

Ravi Capoor, Joint Secretary, Ministry of Commerce and Industry, Government of India, added this is the time for east. We have the resources, we have manpower at incredible price and we have market, all these together making a lethal combination for making economic progress in Asia. He also mentioned that while we have India-Malaysia CECA in place but its utilisation has been only 5 per cent. To overcome this, we need to educate our industries to increase our business, he said.

Hon'ble Dato' Sri Mustapa Bin Mohamed was accompanied by a high level 13-member delegation which also included Malaysian High Commissioner Datuk Mohammad Naimun Ashakli in India.