Union Commerce and Industry Minister Shri PiyushGoyal, and Senior Officers of the Department of Commerce and Directorate General of Foreign Trade (DGFT) today held a meeting with the Export Promotion Councils to discuss various issues concerning the international trade.

Shri Goyal complimented the Exporters for their encouraging performance, even during such trying times. He noted that India’s merchandise exports in April 2021 was USD 30.21 billion, an increase of 197.03% over USD 10.17 billion in April 2020 and an increase of 16.03% over USD 26.04 billion in April 2019. He said that the value of Export in the first week of May 2021 is also up by almost 9% over the same period of 2019-20 (6.48 billion USD). He said that Export excluding POL, is even better, and has increased in this period by 15% over same period of 2019-20. He said that performance of exports in April’21 and 2020-21 gives a hope that an ambitious target of $400 billion merchandise exports can be achieved this year. There is a large potential for enhancing exports in several sectors like Pharma, Engineering, Auto-component, Fisheries and Agro-products, he added.

Regarding the issues raised by the participants, Shri Goyal said that they should approach the Covid helpdesk of the Department for resolving the problems emanating due to Covid related measures. He said that the Department of Commerce has taken up several issues of exporters with the Ministry of Finance for their early resolution, like RoDTEP, MEIS, Inverted duty structure etc. He called upon the exporters to take advantage of the Production-Linked Incentive schemes for various sectors which have been announced.

Export promotion: exporters urged to use production-linked incentives and Covid helpdesk for trade issue resolution. Exporters were encouraged to capitalise on announced Production-Linked Incentive schemes to boost competitiveness across priority sectors. They were instructed to use the Department of Commerce Covid helpdesk for pandemic-related disruptions, while the Department pursues outstanding export issues such as RoDTEP, MEIS and the inverted duty structure with the Ministry of Finance for early resolution.