Minister of Railways, Commerce & Industry, Consumer Affairs and Food & Public Distribution, Piyush Goyal yesterday said that India will be playing a much greater role in the post pandemic world in creating resilient supply chains.

Speaking at the India Global forum, he said that India is working towards greater engagement with countries with which we have a shared ecosystem, countries which believe in transparent rules based trading mechanisms. He said that India is talking to UK, Australia, Canada and EU for trade-related matters, and is keen to speed them up.

Mr. Goyal said that India has tried in WTO to promote a waiver on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights(TRIPS) so that vaccines & other medicines can be available to everyone across the world. He said that it is unfortunate that some European countries are not supporting the initiative and have preferred profit over prudence.

The Minister highlighted that despite being a developing nation, India has already administered over 340 million vaccination.