The government revealed its new foreign trade policy (FTP) for 2023 on Friday, sticking to its goal of $2 trillion in goods and service exports for 2030 while moving away from incentives and towards a system based on remissions and entitlements.
The policy includes initiatives to make international trade settlement in rupee easier even with countries experiencing a currency crisis, as well as a new one-time amnesty programme for export obligation defaulters. Exports from e-commerce will benefit.
Other important aspects of the agreement include a measure to lower transaction costs for smaller businesses, which account for a significant portion of India’s goods exports, and the facilitation of “merchanting trade”— the shipment of goods from one foreign country to another without using Indian ports and with the assistance of an Indian intermediary. policy.
In recognition of new incentive or subsidy schemes for exporters’ incompatibility with the multilateral trade rules under the WTO and India’s commitments to the global body, the new policy, which replaces the FTP of 2015–20 that was extended up to March 2023 in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, avoided implementing them. The policy put more of an emphasis on modifying some of the current programmes.
We need to focus more on exporting goods, according to Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal. Current tax neutralisation programmes like the Export Promotion Capital Goods Scheme, Advance Authorization, the Remission of Duties and Taxes on Exported Products (RoDTEP), and the remission of state and central taxes and levies will continue in some measure. There shouldn’t be He urged the business and the department to focus on the argument that services exports will surpass $1 trillion by 2030 but that goods exports will be behind.
He also emphasised that exports should only be undertaken when there is a competitive advantage, and that the best way to succeed in any industry is not through subsidies but through leveraging capabilities and capacity. He noted that exports had already exceeded $750 billion this fiscal year and predicted that they would surpass $760 or possibly $770 billion this year, up from $670 billion in 2021–22. The FTP has also proposed automatic approval of different permissions depending on procedure simplification and other factors to increase the ease of doing business. For the issuing of EPCG and Advance Authorization, as well as the revalidation of existing authorizations and the extension of export requirements, technological installation is now completed in a single day. Moreover, usage fees for MSMEs under AA and EPCG would be decreased.
Together with the previous 39 towns, four additional towns—Faridabad, Mirzapur, Moradabad, and Varanasi—have been named Towns of Export Excellence (TEE). In order to increase exports at the district level, it will also collaborate with states to advance the districts as export hubs (DEH) initiative.
