India bets on 5 remaining months of G20 for trade push

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By Our Special Correspondent

New Delhi, March 31: After China showed its agility to reconnect with trade partners, India on Friday said that the country would seek the remaining five months of G20 presidency for a massive concentrated outreach with the world both sector-wise and country-wise to raise the bar in the global supply chains.

India’s overall exports, including services and merchandise exports, crossed $750 billion and is expected to cross $760 billion this year, said Union Minister for Commerce Piyush Goyal, while launching the Foreign Trade Policy 2023.

To counter the concerns of the decoupling of the western nations from China in the supply chains, Beijing had sent its top diplomats to Europe, Africa and Latin America to reconnect after scrapping the ‘Zero Covid Policy’. While India has been busy with G20 presidency, China sprung its agile outreach to stitch alliances with European and Arabian countries to assert its stamp in the global supply chains.

To measure up to the emerging challenge in the global trade with the reopening of China, the foreign trade policy aims to capitalize on the goodwill of the country in the world capitals through focused collaborations. Goyal listed four pillars of the new trade policy as incentive to remission; export promotion through collaboration – exporters, states, districts, Indian missions; ease of doing business, reduction in transaction cost and e-initiatives; and emerging areas – E-Commerce Developing Districts as Export Hubs and streamlining SCOMET policy.

“Duty exemption schemes for export production will now be implemented through Regional Offices in a rule-based IT system environment, eliminating the need for manual interface. Four new towns, namely Faridabad, Mirzapur, Moradabad, and Varanasi, have been designated as Towns of Export Excellence (TEE) in addition to the existing 39 towns. The TEEs will have priority access to export promotion funds under the MAI scheme and will be able to avail Common Service Provider (CSP) benefits for export fulfillment under the EPCG Scheme. This addition is expected to boost the exports of handlooms, handicrafts, and carpets,” added Gaoyal.

He stated that there is a wider outreach and understanding of SCOMET (Special Chemicals, Organisms, Materials, Equipment and Technologies) among stakeholders, and the policy regime is being made more robust to implement international treaties and agreements entered into by India. “Various estimates suggest e-commerce export potential in the range of $200 to $300 billion by 2030,” added the minister.

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