India poised to become world's third largest economy: Prabhu

New Delhi: India is poised to become the third largest economy in the world in the next few years, Union Minister Suresh Prabhu said on Thursday, asserting that the government wants to take manufacturing to 20 per cent of the GDP, helped by SMEs.

"One of the great strategies we have is to bring economic development, take our manufacturing to at least 20 per cent of the GDP. "So you can imagine that in the next few years time we will have USD 5 trillion of GDP, so USD 1 trillion of that will come from manufacturing and the substantial part of that, we are aiming to get from small and medium enterprises (SMEs)," he said.

Therefore, he said, the government is trying to be a part of the global supply chains, identifying and creating opportunities.

"In the process we will be very happy to collaborate with our friends from Africa, from other developing countries, to be a part of this process," Prabhu said. Addressing a conference on SMEs here, the Commerce and Industry Minister expressed happiness saying "global recovery seems to be on the anvil".

However, he observed that the recovery would have been faster had nations put even a small amount of money into SMEs. He said the global recession in 2008 started when some countries said that there were banks which were too large to fail, hence pumping in billions of dollars in those banks.

"But they forgot that there are small enterprises which are too small to succeed. The banks are too big to fail, but the small enterprises are too small to succeed. So even if they had put a small amount of money into SMEs, by this time the global recovery would have been faster," Prabhu said.

The minister described small enterprises as the backbone of the global economy, highlighting that they contribute significantly to India's exports and create large employment.