SME Times News Bureau | 13 Jul, 2015
India is passing through a "challenging phase",
particularly in exports, but underscored government's commitment on ensuring
ease of doing business, Director General of Foreign Trade (DGFT), Pravir Kumar
said in Chennai on Sunday.
"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) Chennai, Kumar said even "winning sectors" have been facing
problems in the past few months, reports media.
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.