Given the recent developments in international trade, the Indian government is revamping the nation’s Foreign Trade policy to align it with the future outlook for foreign trade. The pandemic followed by the Russia-Ukraine war has impacted global trade massively. This has pushed the government to adopt a more flexible approach over a five-year timeline.
The new policy will have two parts: first, a vision statement and, second, new schemes and rules related to the vision.
The current policy ran from April 1st, 2015, till 2020. However, since the government had no significant changes to roll out, it deferred the policy revision and reviewed it every six months until September 20th, 2022. Then the Department of Commerce had given another six-month extension because of the worldwide headwinds in the trade sector and fear of a global recession.
Meanwhile, the Director-General (DG) and CEO Federation of Indian Export Organisations (FIEO), Ajay Sahai, shared,
“FTP should be brought into an environment where geopolitical uncertainties are over. Since we continue to face the same situation, in which we were in last year, we feel that whatever changes are required to support exports can be notified without waiting for the policy to come,”.
The final call on a fresh roll-out of FTP will be decided in March-end, contingent upon receiving the PMO’s approval.
