Exports can go up in sectors like pharma, engineering, auto-component, and agro-products

Performance of exports in April’21 and 2020-21 gives a hope that an ambitious target of US $400 billion merchandise exports can be achieved this year, Union Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal said while holding a meeting with the Export Promotion Councils on Tuesday.

He said India’s merchandise exports in April 2021 was US $ 30.21 billion, an increase of 197.03% over US $ 10.17 billion in April 2020 and an increase of 16.03% over US $ 26.04 billion in April 2019,

He said that the value of export in the first week of May 2021 is also up by almost 9% over the same period of 2019-20 ( US $ 6.48 billion). He said that exports excluding POL (Petroleum, Oil and Lubricants) are even better, and have increased in this period by 15% over the same period of 2019-20.

There is a large potential for enhancing exports in several sectors like pharma, engineering, auto-component, fisheries and agro-products, he added.

He said that the Department of Commerce has taken up several issues of exporters with the Ministry of Finance for their early resolution, like RoDTEP, MEIS, Inverted duty structure.

He called upon the exporters to take advantage of the Production-Linked Incentive schemes for various sectors which have been announced.