World’s focus has shifted to India from China

While you were addressing the audience and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, you said that the world’s focus has shifted away from China to India and all eyes are on India today. What has changed about India to your mind to get this kind of attention? India is going through a dramatic development in its economy. It is the world’s largest democracy so it is a development that is attracting a lot of the world’s view. What does this mean for Sweden? You are here with the largest business delegation. Swedish companies have been operating in India for a while now, in fact we have about 1,200 companies registered in India, but if I were to look at the numbers on bilateral trade, it is still sub par. Why do you see that gap and why do you believe that we haven’t been able to capitalize on the full potential yet? As you point out, Swedish companies have been present here for many years. Ericsson since 1903 and Swedish companies employ some 150,000160,000 people in India. Let’s say if a company put up a plant in India, so they do export but it is not necessarily only to Sweden of course, so they export in this region but they export worldwide, so that is how the global economy functions.

Huge possibility: Lofven says Swedish companies, including its defence firms, want to be partners in India’s economic growth.

I see the possibility of increase in trade between India and Sweden of course but the most important thing now is that the Indian economy is growing and we want to be part of that and we do know that we can deliver very good services and products. So we have a huge possibility. Coming back to bilateral dialogue and the conversation that you have had with the Prime Minister Modi, the defence sector is seen as the big area of opportunity. I know that SAAB has expressed its interest in being able to participate much more in India’s defence sector. Has there been any conversation on any specific project within the defence sector? We identify that the defence sector is important, it is important to India. It’s up to India to decide what they want, how they want to develop its defence forces but we are ready both SAAB as a company and as Swedish government, we are ready to go through with that, to develop those thoughts and I know that the grip in projects, we have a fantastic fighter aircraft, it’s very competitive, so whatever we can do to handle that in a good way, we want to do that. I think you said this a couple of months ago that Sweden is facing some of the biggest challenges that it has seen in modern times. You said there is crisis in schools, higher unemployment and there is the refugee crisis. You were forced to close your borders due to the influx of refugees. How challenging is the economic scenario? Of course, it is a huge challenge. This migration crisis is the biggest we have seen since the Second World War. Sixty million people are refugees either within the country or outside the countries. It is a huge human tragedy that we are witnessing right now and of course many people also come to Sweden and we had to take measures to decrease the number.

We haven’t closed the borders but we did decrease dramatically because it was absolutely necessary to do that but my point is that the European Union, as a whole European Union with 28 member countries, some 500 million inhabitants, we could cope with this challenge. So my focus is now to make sure that 28 member countries, all the countries take their responsibilities. But do you feel confident and optimistic of that happening? It is going too slow but we will discuss it in next week again in March and the commission, I believe, is preparing some proposals. We need to act now and now we need to act also in cooperation with Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria because the first thing we want to do is to prevent people from having to take this huge risks as they are doing but there will be people also coming to Europe of course and when that happens, we need to cooperate all the 28 member countries. Are you going to be forced to change your position on allowing immigrants in as it seems to be costing you politically within Sweden? We have changed our policy, right now changing the policy. So we have introduced ID controls for example at our borders and we are changing the policy right now to have the same standard that the European Union minimum standards. We are of course respecting the right to seek asylum, that is a human right, it is a global right. So we will respect that. Did you have any conversation with Prime Minister Modi on innovation and R&D, which is focus area for Sweden? We do share this focus and this interest and we both see the same challenges and opportunities absolutely. So I also invited people that are interested in India to come to Sweden so we can continue that dialogue on innovation especially. So I think we can cooperate on that. Since we are talking about Make In India and the opportunity for Swedish companies in India, all the big brands are here whether it is Ikea, H&M, Volvo, so on and so forth. There is an annual Business Confidence Survey that has been done of Swedish companies operating in India for the last several years and this year, it shows a decline as far as business confidence is concerned. In your conversation with your business delegation, have they raised any specific issues about the operating environment in India? I think when you do this service, from time to time you see changes. It doesn’t have to be dramatic. I believe that companies, enterprises when they look at investments for example, they explore different realities. It could be educational training, it could be taxes, it could be tariffs, it could be different things and they add all these into the total picture of the possibility of making an investment. They haven’t complained about something special and I leave that to the companies on the local politicians and politicians in India of course to deal with that. So in general, we do agree, both the Prime Minister and me, that we have so many possibilities and we will cooperate. Any targets that you have set out in terms of bilateral trade in your conversation with the Prime Minister. How would you like this relationship to be measured at the end of the day? We didn’t decide about specific numbers that this is a goal for our trade. No, we didn’t do that, but we do see the possibility. I think the most important thing for the governments is to support this development in the best way we can and we do that both governments are very interested, are very active in this process and that is the best we can do. The UN Panel’s has said Julian Assange’s detention has been unlawful. What is the Swedish government’s position going to be on this? We took note of the panel’s decision, their view. We are following the Swedish legal system and it has been dealt within our legal system, so I do not interfere in that issue. It is totally up to our legal system. So the UN Panel recommendation is not binding? Not binding. We have to follow our legal system of course.

Source: Mint, 16-02-2016