Districts in focus for exports push

Blitz India Business

NEW DELHI: Incentive schemes help but are not sufficient to push exports to the desired extent. Hence, India is now working on clearing the bottlenecks to growth — logistics, certification, branding and market access. The shift in strategy, announced in July, has states preparing district-level export action plans and the Directorate General of Foreign Trade (DGFT) reviewing progress using internal scorecards on state performance.
The binding constraint on Indian exports, officials say candidly, is no longer market access. It is the inability of firms, MSMEs in particular, to use the trade agreements India has already signed.

Ajay Srivastava of the Global Trade Research Initiative estimated in June that only 20 to 30 per cent of India’s eligible exports claim free trade agreement benefits, against 60 to 70 per cent utilisation by exporters shipping into India. Reasons: Compliance costs exceed modest tariff savings for small firms; partner most-favoured-nation tariffs are already low — near zero in Singapore, under 4 per cent in Japan, Australia, Malaysia and the UAE — so the preference margin is thin; and inverted duty structures leave Indian manufacturers paying 7.5 to 10 per cent on steel and aluminium inputs while competing against duty-free finished imports.

The agreements themselves are working. Minister of State for Commerce Jitin Prasada told the Rajya Sabha on July 24 that FTA partners took 40.5 per cent of India’s merchandise exports in 2025-26 — $179.1 billion. Exports to the UAE under CEPA reached $37.4 billion, up 124 per cent from $16.7 billion in 2021-22; to Australia under ECTA, $7.3 billion, up 83 per cent. The gap is between what the agreements permit and what exporters actually claim.

NITI Aayog’s Export Preparedness Index 2024, released on January 14, 2026, is the first edition to treat districts as the core unit of competitiveness, scoring across business ecosystem, export infrastructure, policy and governance, and performance. Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh led among large states; Uttarakhand, Jammu and Kashmir, Nagaland, Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu, and Goa among smaller ones.

Only 20 to 30 per cent of India’s eligible exports claim free trade agreement benefits, against 60 to 70 per cent utilisation by exporters shipping into India.

The machinery being built

The Export Promotion Mission, approved by the Cabinet on November 12, 2025 with an outlay of ₹25,060 crore to 2030-31, has two arms. Niryat Protsahan covers interest subvention, export factoring, collateral guarantees, e-commerce exporter credit cards and credit enhancement for market diversification. Niryat Disha covers quality and compliance support, international branding, packaging, trade-fair participation, warehousing and logistics reimbursement. It is aimed squarely at MSMEs, first-time exporters and labour-intensive sectors.

Early implementation, as reported by the Government itself in February 2026, shows ten interventions operational, ₹850 crore of interest subvention arrears cleared, 34 market access events approved with ₹45.5 crore of support — and about 3,000 exporters registered for interest subvention and roughly 60 for collateral support. Against a mission of this size, those registration numbers describe an awareness gap rather than a design flaw, and they are exactly the sort of thing a district committee is well placed to close.

The digital layer is also going up. The Trade Connect ePlatform, launched in September 2024, links exporters to DGFT, Indian missions, export promotion councils and banks. BharatTradeNet, announced in the 2025-26 Budget as unified digital public infrastructure for trade documentation and finance, awaits its implementing agency.

The external verdict

The World Trade Organization completed India’s eighth Trade Policy Review in Geneva in July. It records average annual GDP growth of 7.3 per cent across 2022-23 to 2025-26, a services surplus of 4.8 per cent of GDP, 99 per cent of trade processing now electronic, and seaport import release times down about six hours between 2023 and 2025.
On costs, the DPIIT-NCAER study released on 23 September 2025 put India’s logistics cost at 7.97 per cent of GDP for 2023-24 — ₹24.01 lakh crore — displacing the long-repeated folk figure of 13 to 14 per cent. India ranked 38th on the World Bank Logistics Performance Index in 2023.

Three things would make the district model work. Notify the remaining plans.Publish FTA utilisation by agreement. Make the district committee the front desk for the Export Promotion Mission, since 60 registrations for collateral support is a distribution problem that a district office solves better than a national portal.

EXPORTS AT A GLANCE

Sources: PIB, 15 April 2026; Rajya Sabha reply, 24 July 2026; GTRI, 9 June 2026; IBEF/DGFT, 25 March 2026; Cabinet release, 12 November 2025; DPIIT-NCAER, 23 September 2025; WTO WT/TPR/S/488