It is the endeavour of the Government to make India a major player in the world trade by 2020 with focus on enhancing exports and playing an important role in the international trade bodies.

The Foreign Trade Policy (FTP), announced every five years, provides an over arching framework for catalysing India’s exports. The broad principles of FTP are:

(i) The Foreign Trade Policy provides policy support for increasing India’s export growth by adopting market diversification and product diversification plans and maintaining a stable policy environment.

(ii) The policy also provides framework for duty free import of raw materials and duty free import of capital goods for enhancing manufacturing capacity for exports, after fixing export obligation on the exporters.

(iii) One of the guiding principles of FTP is that the taxes should not be exported. Therefore, exporters are granted access to duty free raw material or are provided refund of duties paid in manufacture of exported products.

(iv) Providing trade facilitation measures to improve trade environment.

The information was given by the Minister of State (Independent Charge) in the Ministry of Commerce & Industry Smt. Nirmala Sitharaman in a written reply in Rajya Sabha today.

Export facilitation: duty-free inputs and refunds to support manufacturing capacity and promote market and product diversification. The Foreign Trade Policy provides an export promotion framework supporting export growth via market and product diversification, permits duty free import of raw materials and capital goods subject to export obligations, and provides refunds of duties paid on exported goods so that domestic taxes are not exported, together with trade facilitation measures to improve the trading environment.