Indian exports passing through challenging phase: DGFT

Chennai

 Director General of Foreign Trade (DGFT) Pravir Kumar today said India is passing through a “challenging phase”, particularly in exports, but underscored government’s commitment on ensuring ease of doing business.

“Right now, we are passing through a challenging phase, particularly in exports. In the past six months, there have been global issues, global turmoil also… so the exports are not doing as well as we would like to,” he said.

Addressing an Open House organised by Federation of Indian Export Organisations (FIEO) here, Kumar said even “winning sectors” have been facing problems in the past few months.

However, the government is prepared to face the situation as “we have the inner strength and depth to absorb,” any such short-term problems.

Certain “external” factors such as the “problem in Greece or problem in China” are beyond our control, but “we have to live with it,” and come up with innovative ways to circumvent the problems arising out of these, he added.

However, at the internal level, the government’s endeavour should be to make things easy, and “the best we can do is make trading easy,” he said.

“You must be aware that the government has come up with the new foreign trade policy and you realise that the main thrust of the new foreign trade policy is on ease of doing business, making trading easy,” he added.

Reducing the number of documents required for export-import is “just one of the steps” by the government in its endeavour to make ease of doing business, he said.

Meanwhile, the DGFT also recalled his department launching online payment of fee yesterday, which again is a part of efforts to ensure ease of doing business.

Further, the Revenue Department is working on a single window clearance system for customs procedures and once this takes shape in about six months it would be a major initiative, he added.

Kumar also urged exporters to do trade with countries which had signed Free Trade Agreements with India.

PTI