NEW DELHI: The commerce ministry has embarked on an exercise to identify and estimate the investments required for the country’s export infrastructure, after having set a target of $1 trillion merchandise export target by 2030, a senior official said Thursday.
The exercise is being carried out in collaboration with the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and will aim to identify areas, where augmentation of capacities will be required in railways, roads, ports and airports to enable movement of goods for exports.
“We need to create infrastructure which will support an additional 2,000 million tonnes of goods movement in the ports. Similarly in the railways, we need to create an infrastructure which will allow railways to carry on an additional 338 million tonnes of goods by 2030. Airports also need to create an additional 5 million tonnes of facilities for movement of goods. So these are big challenges but not insurmountable challenges,” Director General of Foreign Trade Santosh Sarangi said.
When goods exports are expected to touch $1 trillion, imports would be around $1.5 trillion so capacity for movement of $2.5 trillion of goods have to be created. “That is the target on which the department is working,” additional secretary in the department of commerce Anant Swarup said at CII’s conference on Resilient Export Logistics for Trade and Connectivity.
The study will also identify where additional $560 billion of exports will come from – the sectors and clusters – in the next six years. In the last financial year India’s merchandise exports were $437.06 billion and imports stood at $677.24 billion.
“Unless we know about the clusters, and ports or airports from where this $1 trillion of exports and $1.5 trillion of imports is going to happen, we would not be able to do a baseline study to identify the gaps which exist and then enhance our infrastructure capabilities,” Swarup said.
He also said that the government is also focusing on ways to push India’s integration into the global supply chains (GVCs) as at present about 70 per cent of the global trade is happening through these chains.
Saransi also said there is a huge potential to increase exports through e-commerce. Last year, the cross-border e-commerce trade was about $800 billion of which India has a share of just $2 billion. The government had earlier said that it is aiming for $200 billion of $1 trillion exports by 2030 to come from e-commerce. By 2030 global e-commerce exports are expected to reach $2 trillion. “We need to reorient our policies to facilitate an e-commerce ecosystem,” Sarangi said.
Source: The Financial Express