By TIOL News Service

NEW DELHI, APR 02, 2015: WHILE announcing the New Foreign Trade Policy the MoS for Commerce and Industry, Ms Nirmala Sitharaman, also laid down a roadmap for India's global trade engagement in the coming years. The FTP Statement seeks to enable India to respond to the challenges of the external environment, keeping in step with a rapidly evolving international trading architecture and make trade a major contributor to the country's economic growth and development. She promised to have regular interactions with all stakeholders, including State Governments to achieve the national objectives.

FTP 2015-20 introduces two new schemes - "Merchandise Exports from India Scheme (MEIS)" for export of specified goods to specified markets and "Services Exports from India Scheme (SEIS)" for increasing exports of notified services, in place of a plethora of schemes earlier, with different conditions for eligibility and usage. There would be no conditionality attached to any scrips issued under these schemes. Duty credit scrips issued under MEIS and SEIS and the goods imported against these scrips are fully transferable. For grant of rewards under MEIS, the countries have been categorized into 3 Groups, whereas the rates of rewards under MEIS range from 2% to 5%. Under SEIS the selected Services would be rewarded at the rates of 3% and 5%.

Measures have been adopted to nudge procurement of capital goods from indigenous manufacturers under the EPCG scheme by reducing specific export obligation to 75% of the normal export obligation. This will promote the domestic capital goods manufacturing industry. Such flexibilities will help exporters to develop their productive capacities for both local and global consumption. Measures have been taken to give a boost to exports of defense and hi-tech items. At the same time e-Commerce exports of handloom products, books/periodicals, leather footwear, toys and customized fashion garments through courier or foreign post office would also be able to get benefit of MEIS (for values upto 25,000 INR). These measures would not only capitalize on India's strength in these areas and increase exports but also provide employment.

Commerce Minister stated that although exports from SEZs had seen phenomenal growth, significantly higher than the overall export growth of the country, in recent times they had been facing several challenges. In order to give a boost to exports from SEZs, government has now decided to extend benefits of both the reward schemes (MEIS and SEIS) to units located in SEZs. It is hoped that this measure will give a new impetus to development and growth of SEZs in the country.