India wants to boost trade with the African continent

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: up, though the import growth rate of India from developing countries is higher than that of developed countries during the same period. This asymmetry in bilateral flow of trade between India and Africa needs to be corrected by taking the experiences from the past particularly from India’s engagement with South African trade, Chaturvedi points out.

Over the past five years, India has extended credit worth $2 billion to African countries, of which more than half has already been taken up. Its economic links are moving beyond its traditional Indian Ocean and Commonwealth partners. Investment in Côte d’Ivoire, for example, is expected to grow to $1 billion by 2011, which represents 10% of all Indian foreign investments over the past decade.

Also, in the last few years, India has acquired considerable experience in undertaking projects in different countries in Africa through extension of concessional lines of credit by the Exim Bank of India.

So far, between 2003-04 and 2008-09, India has extended lines of credit amounting to $2.15 billion. Over the next five years, the amount will more than double. The government has also offered additional lines of credit amounting to $5.4 billion, both bilaterally and to the regional economic communities of Africa.

Developing infrastructure in the areas of railways, IT, telecom and power generation and physical connectivity in Africa would be priority. “We will promote activities of small, medium and micro enterprises. In this task, we will reach out to the private sector and make full use of public-private partnership,” Singh told the African leaders here.

Sino-African trade now stands at $55 billion. India’s concern about Chinese expansion is very real and most visible in the African-Indian Ocean rim, with deepening ties such as defence agreements with Mozambique and the Seychelles.

The distribution of India’s imports in different sectors from the rest of the world and Africa indicate that overall imports are expanding at the rate of 16.7% per annum between 1997-08 and 2006-07, and variations in sectoral growth during the same period range between 31.7 % and 2.95 % per annum.