Suresh Prabhu addressing the Export Summit 2018 in New Delhi

India’s exports rose by 9.8%, in financial year 2017-18, which is the highest rate of growth in six years. This positive growth in exports has taken place at a time when there is a lot of negative headwinds globally. This was stated by Union Minister of Commerce & Industry and Civil Aviation, Suresh Prabhu, at the Export Summit 2018 organised by Confederation of Indian Industry in New Delhi today. The Minister further stated that Commerce Ministry is working on a strategy to revitalize India’s exports and is working with key exporting ministries to formulate sectoral, commodity and territory specific export strategy. Meetings with concerned ministries have already been held where different ministries and stakeholders have been consulted after which a matrix of specific action points have been prepared sector wise, commodity wise and territory wise.

Suresh Prabhu further stated that he is personally monitoring the progress and regular meetings are being held with sectoral ministries,export promotion councils and exporters.Certain issues which were affecting growth of exports have been specifically taken up with Department of Revenue and Ministry of Environment.

The Commerce Minister also said that the soon to be unveiled agri export policy will give a major boost to the agricultural sector and will pave the way for Indian farmer’s income to be doubled.

India produces 600 MT of agricultural produce and has the capacity to export the excess production to the world.

Directorate General of Foreign Trade (DGFT), Alok Vardhan Chaturvedi, spoke about the recent initiatives taken by the Commerce Ministry to smoothen procedures for exporters. Most procedures are now online and hard copy of documents are not required to be submitted. DGFT is also planning to have online export related courses to inform, train and facilitate first time exporters. The DGFT is also in the process of overhauling the IT network of the DGFTso that there is no wastage of time for online submission of documents.

Export competitiveness strategy seeks to revitalise trade via sector-specific action matrices and streamlined digital export procedures. Commerce Ministry is implementing a coordinated export competitiveness strategy using sector-wise, commodity-wise and territory-wise action matrices informed by inter-ministerial and stakeholder consultations, with ministerial monitoring and engagement to address constraints with revenue and environmental authorities. The Ministry will launch an agri export policy to enable surplus agricultural production to reach global markets and DGFT is digitizing export procedures, removing hard-copy requirements, upgrading IT infrastructure, and planning online training for first-time exporters to streamline export facilitation.