India’s statement for the session 1 of the Multi-year Expert Meeting on Trade, Services and Development 15–16 April 2026, delivered by Mr. Gaurav Kumar Thakur, Counsellor, Permanent Mission of India to UN,

15 April 2026, Geneva

Session 1. Servicification and development implications Presentation

Guiding questions-

• How does servicification affect productivity, upgrading and export performance across countries and sectors in your country and/or region?

• How is digitalisation reshaping servicification pathways in developing economies?

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Thank you, Chair.

My congratulations to you on your election as Chair for this important meeting. It was also a pleasure to hear from the panelists on servicification.

India views servicification as a vital catalyst for economic diversification and structural transformation. Traditional and knowledge-intensive services increasingly underpin production across agriculture, manufacturing, and services. In India, the services sector contributes to more than half of our economic output and is deeply embedded in our goods exports.

For developing economies, servicification offers tangible pathways to diversify away from commodity dependence and transition towards higher-productivity activities. By integrating services like design, R&D, and logistics, industries can upgrade their products into global value chains.

Mr. Chair

Digitalisation is fundamentally accelerating servicification by making a large number of services tradable, and at scale. However, as the background note correctly highlights, the outcomes of these shifts depend heavily on national capacities.

At various multilateral forums, India has consistently emphasized that to truly harness these pathways, the international community must confront persistent digital divides. High-quality connectivity remains starkly unequal. For instance, 5G networks currently cover 84 per cent of populations in high-income countries but only 4 per cent in low-income countries.

For digitalisation to yield inclusive growth, developing economies must retain the regulatory policy space to govern their data and nurture domestic digital ecosystems. While modern trade agreements increasingly cover digital trade, multilateral rules must not preempt the ability of developing nations to build their own digital public infrastructure.

Equally critical is human capital and appropriate skills development. While technologies are enhancing productivity and enabling new service models, the pace of change is outpacing workforce and firm-level adaptation. As a result, many economies face widening skills gaps, with rising demand for specialised capabilities in areas such as data analytics, cybersecurity, cloud computing, and AI, alongside greater automation of routine service tasks.

Facilitating the temporary movement of natural persons and skilled professionals would be useful in order to fully utilize the fruits of servicification. In this context, there is a need for implementing fair and demand driven migration and mobility pathways.

Servicification thus highlights the overall complementarity between manufacturing and services, rather than the trade-offs, and offers countries a pathway to raise manufacturing value addition while supporting jobs within a services-enabled growth framework.

My question to the panelists would be: How can mutual recognition of skills help servicification pathways to become more productive and mutually beneficial for developing and developed economies.

Thank you.

***