India is all set to achieve the target of one per cent share of the world trade in exports well ahead of schedule, Director General of Foreign Trade L Mansingh asserted on Tuesday.
Delivering the keynote address at a 'Post-Exim Policy Exporters' meet', jointly organised by the Federation of Indian Export Organisations (southern region) and the South Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, in Chennai, he said according to indications, India had already achieved 0.8 per cent by the end of 2002.
''If one goes by the present trend, we hope to achieve the one per cent target well ahead of 2007,'' he said, drawing instantaneous applause from a host of exporters, bureaucrats and other officials.
Observing that the export growth in 2002-03, had registered a satisfactory performance, Mansingh said, ''we have achieved a number of landmarks with the foreign exchange reserves crossing the $50 billion mark touching $51.75 billion during the period.'' '
He said the government was committed to stepping up the export growth and keeping this in mind more thrust had been given in the Export-Import policy to make India a significant player in world market.
Urging the exporters to be more competitive, Mansingh noted that the transaction costs were very high. ''It (the transaction costs) will continue to be high unless we eliminate the abuse of the facilities by the exporters,'' he said.
"There is a bottleneck in achieving global competitiveness due to such costs like customs duty and other local taxes and efforts are being made by the government to bring it down to the minimum,'' he said.
Mansingh also suggested the implementation of a risk management module to tighten the procedure and isolate the wrong doers from those who abide by the rules and regulations.
''This is what we are aiming at,'' he said and called for involvement of state governments to accelerate export growth. The states could draw up their own export policy and set up their own export commissions, he noted.
This, Mansingh pointed out, would help settle a lot of export-related issues at the local level with the initiative of the state government and active cooperation of the local industries associations without referring it to the Union Ministry, which was time consuming and added to the transaction costs.
The states should provide sufficient infrastructure and take care of the local approvals to boost the export growth under the cluster development project.
Observing that several states were coming forward in this aspect, he said Tamil Nadu was one of them.
S K Mishra, member-customs, Central Board of Excise and Customs, in his special address, said the customs was planning to add 12 more Customs locations under the electronic data inter-change scheme (in addition to the existing 27 locations) by the year-end to cover 95 per cent of the global trade.
He highlighted various steps taken by the Customs to provide ''hassle-free environment'' for the exporters and pointed to the introduction of the accelerated clearance centre at the Chennai sea port as a pilot project in April. This would be extended to other cities, he added.
Pointing to the country's import bill exceeding export earnings, he appealed to the exporters to create surplus to balance the deficit. ''We want India to be an aid giving country and not an aid receiving country,'' Mishra said.
