PlastIndia: Higher Growth Will Return Next Year; Plastics Consumption to Double

Delegates to this year’s PlastIndia triennial plastics show and conference currently taking place in New Delhi, were told about the challenges and the huge opportunities that the Indian plastics sector offers. India’s per capita consumption of polymers is still 6 kg, well below China at 22.8 kg and the world average of 24.6 kg, said S. Mitra, executive director/petrochemicals at IndianOil. Consumption in India is expected to double by 2015 but that would require the investment projects already announced to be implemented quicker than they are, he says.

Meanwhile, growth of the Indian economy has slowed down as the country grapples with its macro-economic issues, inflation and reforms, said Rajiv Kumar, secretary general at the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce (FICCI; New Delhi). This year GDP growth is expected to be about 6.8%, compared with 8.5%/year over the last 10 years. Next year will be better with GDP growth projected at 7%-7.5%, he says. But “despite these issues, the India growth story remains in tact,” Kumar says. The country needs to make sure that it returns to its traditional growth of 8.5%-9%/year, “because, given the 12 million jobs that we need to create in the country each year, there is no alternative,” he says. Policy reforms are needed today to remove the bottlenecks on the supply side that are holding back investment and capacity expansion. India will have to depend on its own strengths and resources and that will be possible if the government and the private sectors work together, he says.

K. Jose Cyriac, Secretary Chemicals and Petrochemicals at the government of India, in his keynote address, said that India is still among the world’s fastest growing economies and it has demonstrated its resilience to external economic shocks. The Indian chemical and petrochemical sectors accounts for about 14% of industrial production and 17.6% of the manufacturing sector. It is growing at above GDP and by volume it is the sixth largest globally and the third biggest in Asia. Chemicals and petrochemicals account for 13% of India’s total exports and 8% of its imports. Cyriac said that India lacks feedstocks but it has a huge domestic market. The government, he said, is taking steps to introduce innovations, which will provide alternate feedstocks to oil and gas. These include coal bed methane for the petrochemical sector. “India has the world’s fourth largest coal reserves which are estimated to hold about 92 trillion cu feet of coal bed methane,” he says. Production is expected to start in the next few years, he adds.

 

 

 

 

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