Disappointed with India's exports growth for the month of November, industry body Federation of Indian Export Organisations (FIEO) Friday said that the Centre needs to revisit its export strategy as some recent Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) are encouraging imports rather than exports.

"The Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Agreement (CECA) or Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA) or Free Trade Agreements (FTA) has facilitated more imports than exports from India. The recent export figure points to revisiting our strategy for exploiting the markets with which we have signed FTA, CECA or CEPA," said M Rafeeque Ahmed, President, FIEO, in a press conference in New Delhi.

He said, "One of the reasons for lacklustre performance of Indian exports is slow penetration in the markets where we have signed CECA/ CEPA or FTA in last few years."

India's exports to ASEAN went down to USD 14.66 billion in first six months of the financial year as compared to exports if USD 36.74 billion achieved in 2011-12. A further disaggregation of exports shows that while exports to Singapore, Japan, Korea, Malaysia and Thailand in April-September was much less than the pro-rata exports in the corresponding period in 2011. On the contrary, imports on these countries shows encouraging trend the same period.

FIEO chief said that this points to revisiting the export strategy. He urged the government, "To start with, all such countries/ regions should be put under the Focus Market Scheme, if not, under Special Focus Market Scheme."

He said, "A planned Market Development Scheme with sizable corpus be formed to support export marketing efforts in these regions as initial development of markets would require constant interaction with buyers through visit, B2B meets and exhibitions."

"Focused research on sound commercial intelligence be conducted by the government so as to provide initial inputs to the industry for exploiting these markets," he said.

Ahmed also said the Government must advise banks to provide adequate credit to exporters.

"Whenever there is a decline in exports banks ask their credit departments to go slow on credit. Just like the agriculture sector, banks also need fixed credit schemes for exporters," he added.