Exporters' body FIEO has expressed concern that Indian exports may hit hard by the ongoing crisis in global economy, which, unlike the slowdown in recent past, has spread across both the advanced and emerging economies.

"The slowdown in world economy has not affected our exports as we diversified to new and emerging economies. The loss of exports in advance economies was compensated by increasing exports to new markets. However, the recent trend points to slowdown in emerging economies which is not good sign for Indian exports," cautioned FIEO recently at stakeholders' consultations with Union Commerce, Industry and Textiles Minister Anand Sharma in New Delhi recently.  

"Department of Commerce should revisit the market strategy including Focus Market Scheme and Market Linked Focus Scheme to concentrate on countries where we are looking for increasing exports," it viewed.

The industry body added that the Market Linked Focus Scheme should be extended to Iran to cover new products such as Pharmaceuticals, Auto components, Steel products, etc. Since India has signed comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement with Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, these countries should be added to Focus Market Scheme so that the benefit of market access is fully utilized by Indian exporters.

FIEO also said the Centre should act on providing adequate marketing support to the export sector.

“Countries are providing adequate marketing support to SMEs exporters while in India the budget for the MAI and MDA together now is only Rs.200 crore. How exports of over US$ 300 billion can be provided support from such small financial outlay,” it said.

“Department of Commerce should frame a plan scheme with a corpus of about 0.5% of total exports so that some sizable funds are available for marketing support of small and medium exporters,” it added.