Piyush Goyal holds meeting with export promotion councils, discusses issues concerning international trade

Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal and senior officers of the Department of Commerce and Directorate General of Foreign Trade (DGFT) on Tuesday held a meeting with the export promotion councils to discuss various issues concerning the international trade.

Goyal complimented the exporters for their encouraging performance, even during such trying times and said that performance of exports in April'21 and 2020-21 gives a hope that an ambitious target of $400 billion merchandise exports can be achieved this year.

He noted that India's merchandise exports in April 2021 was USD 30.21 billion, an increase of 197.03 per cent over USD 10.17 billion in April 2020 and an increase of 16.03 per cent over USD 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 per cent over the same period of 2019-20 (6.48 billion USD).

According to an official release, he said that export excluding POL, is even better, and has increased in this period by 15 per cent over 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.

Regarding the issues raised by the participants, Goyal said that they should approach the COVID helpdesk of the department for resolving the problems emanating due to pandemic-related measures.

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

( With inputs from ANI )