NDA Govt. Unveils Foreign Trade Policy 2015-20
01 April, New Delhi
The Union Government Wednesday unveiled its much awaited Foreign Trade Policy 2015-20, FTP. The new policy focuses on boosting exports and create jobs while supporting the Centre’s Make In India’ and Digital India’ programs.
The policy document was released by the Minister of Commerce and Industry Nirmala Sitharaman in New Delhi. While releasing the FTP,
Sitharaman said that the new policy will support both manufacturing and service sector with special emphasis on improving the ease of doing business.
She also said, the government intends to promote stable and sustainable policy framework in both merchandise and service to give global competitiveness.
The government announced several incentives in the five-year Foreign Trade Policy for exporters, with an aim to double India’s exports of goods and services to USD 900 billion by 2020 and to raise the India’s share in world export from 2 to 3.5 percent.
The objective of the new policy is to create architecture for the Indian economy so that it can gain global competitiveness and promote the diversification of Indian export.
Its also focusing on to expanding its market and better integration with major regions in order to rationalize imports and reduce the trade imbalance. The policy is specifically focused on boosting defence, hi-tech items and e-commerce exports of handloom products through courier or foreign post offices.
The new trade policy introduced two new scheme, the first one is Merchandise Export from India Scheme, MEIS for export of specific goods to specific markets.
The other, Services Export form India Scheme, SEIS to increase the export of notified services. These two schemes will replace multiple schemes with different conditions for eligibility and usage.
Under the policy the export obligation under the export promotion capital goods scheme has been reduced to 75 percent from 90 percent to promote capital goods and domestic manufacturing and enable them to develop their production capacities for both local and global consumption.
The other objective of the policy is to move towards paperless working in 24×7 environment. The policy comes at a time when export growth contracted 15 per cent in February 2014-15, reporting a negative growth for the third consecutive month.