SME Times News Bureau | 11 May, 2021
Union Commerce and
Industry Minister Piyush Goyal, and Senior Officers of the Department of
Commerce and Directorate General of Foreign Trade (DGFT) on Tuesday held a
meeting with the Export Promotion Councils to discuss various issues concerning
the international trade.
Goyal complimented the
Exporters for their encouraging performance, even during such trying times. He
noted that India’s
merchandise exports in April 2021 was USD 30.21 billion, an increase of
197.03% over USD 10.17 billion in April 2020 and an increase of 16.03% over USD
26.04 billion in April 2019.
He said that the value
of Export in the first week of May 2021 is also up by almost 9% over the same
period of 2019-20 (6.48 billion USD).
He said that Export
excluding POL, is even better, and has increased in this period by 15% over
same period of 2019-20.
He said that
performance of exports in April’21 and 2020-21 gives a hope that an ambitious
target of $400 billion merchandise exports can be achieved this year.
There is a large
potential for enhancing exports in several sectors like Pharma, Engineering,
Auto-component, Fisheries and Agro-products, he added.
Regarding the issues
raised by the participants, Shri Goyal said that they should approach the Covid
helpdesk of the Department for resolving the problems emanating due to Covid
related measures.
He said that the
Department of Commerce has taken up several issues of exporters with the Ministry
of Finance for their early resolution, like RoDTEP, MEIS, Inverted duty
structure etc.
He called upon the
exporters to take advantage of the Production-Linked Incentive schemes for
various sectors which have been announced.