New Foreign Trade Policy can make India bigger player: FKCCI
The new Foreign Trade Policy (FTP) unveiled by the Centre will benefit businesses with reduced costs, an amnesty scheme for export obligation defaults and faster clearances.
The FTP has achieved a new milestone by moving away from an incentive-based regime to a tax remission regime and has set an ambitious target of almost tripling India’s goods and services exports to $2 trillion by 2030, from an estimated $760 billion in 2022-23.
While it looks a formidable target on the face of it, a lot of improvements in place in the FTP are designed to deliver it, such as digitising applications, reducing timelines for processing applications and lowering transaction costs for exporters.
FKCCI would like to compliment the Union Commerce, Industry & Textiles Minister notably for introducing a one-time amnesty scheme for export obligations under the existing Advance Authorisation and Export Promotion Capital Goods (EPCG) schemes that allow imports of capital goods subject to specified export obligations.
The cut in application fee for AA and EPCG schemes for MSMEs is also one of the suggestions made by us in our memorandum submitted to the Centre, for which we are grateful.
The move to drive international trade settlement in Indian rupee and extend benefits to exports paid via INR will greatly cheer the exporters.
FKCCI also commends the policy for enabling export of restricted goods by allowing exporters to source goods from one country and send them to another country without hitting Indian ports, apart from simplifying policies to facilitate export of certain goods.
One area of concern is that the goods exports are lagging behind services exports. But we are hoping that the new Special Advance Authorisation scheme launched for the clothing & apparel sector, coupled with the proposed outreach plan both country-wise and sector-wise, would help move up the share of India’s merchandise exports in global trade to around 7-10%.
B.V. Gopal Reddy
President, FKCCI
