Steady trade policy has paid off, says Khullar.

New Delhi: In the last one-year despite the economic uncertainty around the globe, the commerce department stuck to a steady policy to deal with the crisis and avoided any ‘’dramatic changes’’. The policy does seem to have indeed paid off, with exports showing high year-on-year growth in recent months. ‘’In the Foreign Trade Policy (announced in August 2009) we were brave enough to say that we are going to have a holding operation for two years, we also diversified markets to help our export sectors,’’ commerce secretary Rahul Khullar said on Wednesday.

When the last financial year started India’s exports had plunged over 30% in the backdrop of the global meltdown, however since November 2009 the exports have shown signs of a turnaround.

Khullar said the re-start of the Doha round of talks, which were left in the backburner for want of a consensus, was a major achievement of his ministry in 2009-10. ‘’We restarted the Doha round of talks with the mini-ministerial meeting here in September last year, we may not have made a big break through but at least the process of dialogue had started,’’ he added.

President of apex export body Federation of Indian Export Organisation (FIEO) A Sakhtivel said that though the government had been very proactive in giving the export sector a push especially when markets in the west were contracting, the ministry could not create a market development fund to help the cash-starved exporters. ‘’We had proposed that the government create a corpus of Rs 3,000 crore as a market development fund, however, it could not convince the finance ministry,’’ he said. Khullar also pointed out to the approach India undertook to help Indian pharmaceutical companies in the backdrop of constant drug seizures by the European authorities. ‘’We dealt with the matter quietly diplomatically, things seem to have calmed down now.’’

Executive director at Delhi-based think tank Centre for Trade and Development (Centad) Linu Mathew Philip said that he hoped that government would have pushed its agricultural exports more by investing in smaller farms.

Source : Financial Express