To curb the soaring inflation that reaches three year’s high of 7.41% of the week ended on March 29, Union Commerce Minister on Friday announced to bar the cement export and curb the incentive on the steel export.
Besides, restraining on cement and steel export, Minister has also announced to encourage the exports of those essential goods that were badly affected from the dollar depreciation and were earlier the major source of income in terms of foreign currency. The Commerce Minister has set a new target of USD 200-billion for 2008-09 as against this year’s USD 160-billion. However, later it was revised to USD155-billion due to sliding in the exports of textiles and micro-industries’ goods.
Unveiling the new Foreign Trade Policy-2008 in Capital, Kamal Nath said on the scaled new target, “Ambitious it may be, but achieving it is not impossible. It means we will have to ensure an average annual growth rate of 25 per cent consistently for the next 12 years.”
While on the inflation issue, he stated, “To curb inflation in essential commodities, the government has banned the export of non-basmati rice, edible oils and pulses. Benefits of the DEPB (Duty Entitlement Passbook) scheme have been withdrawn on the export of rice, cement and primary steel items.”
“We are also withdrawing the incentives under promotion schemes on the export of cement and primary steel items.” he added.
Speaking on the new Foreign Trade Policy- 2008, Minister said that exports would boost the manufacturing and it further the growth, so exports could not be curb for controlling the inflation.
‘This year government has set an ambition export target of $200-billion and for achieving this target, it has also provided several measures including entering new market and extending duration of a slew of sops’, as Nath told in the releasing function.
To achieve the self-made target of 5% share of world trade by 2020 from current 1.5%, government has announced to extend interest subsidies for many products and income tax refund under 10B of Income Tax Act till March 2009.
Besides it, government has decided to introduce new incentives on export of vegetables, sports goods, toys and computer hardware. From this, year, India will enter into 10 new export markets in its export list covering Albania, Bosnia, Colombia, Croatia, Djibouti, Ghana, Honduras, Mongolia, Macedonia and Sudan. However, IT sector is not included in the export goods list.
The exports in manufacturing goods have been affected most in the last fiscal, to waived off it, government has cut the duty on the import of machinery under the Export Promotion Capital Goods scheme to three per cent from five per cent. Moreover, government has also deducted the average export obligation under the scheme for segments that saw a decline in exports in the previous years.
Meanwhile, the obligations of premier trading houses would be calculated on the basis of an average of last five years’ exports instead of three.
Commerce Ministry has also predicted to hike the new jobs with the rising export sectors especially in the high-job generating export sectors. As per ministry estimates, every $1 billion of incremental exports would create 2.26 lakh new jobs. If exports go up by $45 billion as per ministry estimation, it can cross 10-millions of new jobs.
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