Department of commerce proactively engaging with states to promote exports: Wadhawan

The department of commerce is proactively engaging with state governments to promote exports, Commerce Secretary Anup Wadhawan said on Wednesday.
The secretary also requested state governments to extend their support to take forward the initiatives to boost country's outbound shipments.

"We have been proactively engaging with states in terms of encouraging them to create export policies, in terms of allocating the export function to a senior level, to a dedicated department and to a dedicated officer," he said.

Wadhawan was speaking at the release of the first edition of 'Export Preparedness Index, 2020'.

Gujarat has topped the chart, followed by Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu.

"We are working with states to not only have a state export strategy covering infrastructure, logistics, incentives, all other facilitation and promotional measures but also having a decentralised strategy covering each and every district," he added.

Talking about the index, he said the issues related to wrong attribution of export numbers of one state to other would be addressed.

Those issues "we are trying to address" through exporter awareness by creating windows in the shipping bills and in the GSTN formats, "so that right at the ground level, the source of the exports, right to the district level is accurately captured and states do not have this grievance that exports originating from a district in their state is wrongly attributed to some other state," he said.

There has been a paradigm shift in the incentivisation regime for exports, he added.

"You see as a competing nation, competing with various countries including new entrants into the export arena like Vietnam, we have to match the global sought of package which is available to investors," he said.

He added that India has started moving in that direction in the recent past, and the entire approach to incentivising exports has seen a paradigm shift.

"We are moving away from the MEIS (Merchandise Exports from India Scheme) type of incentive to production linked incentives, to improvement in the physical environment in which investors can start operating in a plug and play manner," Wadhawan said.

Export performance in quantitative and qualitative dimensions are key metrics for assessing the health and prospects of an economy, he added.

Contracting for the fifth straight month, India's exports slipped 10.21 per cent to USD 23.64 billion in July on account of decline in shipments of petroleum, leather and gems and jewellery items.