In the face of slowing global demand, Indian exporters have urged the Centre to support R&D initiatives, raise Budget outlays for global marketing efforts and develop an Indian shipping line as foreign operators tend to arm twist smaller Indian firms.
India’s outward remittance on transport services is increasing with rising exports, the Federation of Indian Export Organisations (FIEO) president (officiate) Israr Ahmed said, pointing out that $80 billion is currently paid each year to foreign shipping firms, which would rise to $200 billion by 2030, when the government is targeting a trillion dollars of goods exports.
FIEO has also nudged the government to raise the Budget allocation to the Market Access Initiative (MAI) scheme, from the ₹200 crore earmarked this year, which they said is grossly inadequate. “For aggressive marketing, there is a need for the creation of a corpus of minimum 0.5% of the preceding year’s exports for the MAI Scheme,” Mr. Ahmed said.
