The Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT), India’s Apex Trade body representing 7 crore traders and 40,000 trade Associations, has announced the launch of a national campaign “Indian goods – our pride” to boycott Chinese goods across the country from June 10.
CAIT said that under this campaign, we will not only motivate traders not to sell Chinese goods but will also urge Indian consumers to buy indigenous products in place of Chinese goods and in this way Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s call “Vocal for Local ” will also be fructified. The CAIT is committed to make the PM’s vision a grand success and will play a major role to achieve it.
Announcing this campaign today, CAITÂ National President Mr. B.C. Bhartia and Nationa Secretary General Mr. Praveen Khandelwal said that China has always been India’s antagonist in important matters and most importantly in promoting Pakistan’s devious tactics and terrorism against India. Even last year when the Pulwama attack took place, China tried their best to protect Masood Azhar.
This clearly shows China’s attitude and approach towards India. CAIT has been continuously campaigning from time to time for boycott of Chinese products for the last four years on the back of Government’s strong push for Make in India program. As a result of these initiatives, imports from China have dropped from $ 76 billion in 2017-18 to $ 70 billion at present.This $ 6 billion import decline tells the true story of the use of indigenous goods and changing consumer sentiments.
Mr. Bhartia & Mr. Khandelwal said that the CAIT has targeted to reduce India’s imports of Chinese goods by about 13 Bn USD (approx Rs 1 lakh crore)Â by December 2021. To achieve this goal, CAIT has prepared a comprehensive list of about 3000 products imported from China for which Indian substitutes and alternatives are easily available and the customers of India will also not mind because all those things are already made in India.
The list of 3000 products prepared by CAIT is basically FMCG, consumer goods, toys, festive goods, fabrics, textiles, stationery, paper, food items, electrical, electronics, builder hardware etc. They also said that Indian manufacturers have an important role in the Chinese product boycott and CAIT will work with Indian manufacturers to promote the use of indigenous goods nationwide!
Both leaders said that the import of Chinese goods into India in the year 2001 was only $ 2 billion, which has increased to $ 70 billion in the year 2019. In just about 20 years, this import has increased by almost 35 times, meaning that the goods imported from China have increased by 3500 percent. This staggering figure clearly shows how China has tried to capture Indian markets which is one of the world’s largest.
Mr. Bhartia and Mr. Khandelwal told that due to the Corona lock-down for the last 75 days non- stop CAIT has held a daily video conference since March 25 till now, in which prominent business leaders from all the states of the country participated and seriously contemplated on the capture of India’s retail market by China. It also analyzed the efforts of the people and decided that the time has come when the traders and people of the country should unite and boycott Chinese products and hence decided to launch the “Indian Goods – Our pride” national campaign. Due to prevailing circumstances of Covid, the nuances and intricacies of the campaign will be inculcated to traders via video conference. Apart from this, CAIT will also run a big campaign across the country through social media and will connect more and more people to this campaign. The CAIT has constituted a national committee to run the nationwide campaign with its Vice Chairman Mr. Brij Mohan Agarwal as Convenor and Mr. Sumit Agrawal & Dhairysheel Patil as Co-Convenor beside having senior trade leaders of all States as its members.
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