With an aim to enhance the country’s exports, the government will revive the export interest subsidy scheme, which expired in March 2014. It has already made budgetary provision of over Rs 1,600 crore for the export interest subsidy.
Commerce ministry is presently in discussion with the finance ministry and selecting the sectors that would be covered by the scheme in the new five-year policy expected to be announced at the end of September.
The Foreign Trade Policy (FTP), which governs all exports and imports related activities in India, ended on March 31 and the new government will introduce new FTP for the period 2014-19 in September 2014. In the previous trade policy, the benefit of interest subsidy was earlier available to sectors such as micro small and medium enterprises, handlooms, handicraft, carpets, toys, sports goods, processed products, certain engineering and textiles goods. The export interest subsidy helped increase the competitiveness of goods on global level.
The new FTP is likely to promote exports of specific products in specific geographies, job-creating manufacturing sectors and would also abolish conventional method of exports by focusing more on areas like branding of products in the global markets, exports of services and hi-tech products and new strategy for marketing.