The Government of India has announced a new Foreign Trade Policy for the period 2015-2020 on 1st April, 2015. Details of the Foreign Trade Policy 2015-2020 are available at the website of the Directorate General of Foreign Trade at http://http://dgft.gov.in/. The important measures taken by the Government in the Foreign Trade Policy 2015-2020 to include ‘Make in India’ and ‘Digital India’ programmes to ease the trade are: (i) Specific Export Obligation under Export Promotion Capital Goods (EPCG) scheme, incase capital goods are procured from indigenous manufacturers, has been reduced to 75% of the normal export obligation, in order to promote domestic capital goods manufacturingindustry.
(ii) Under Merchandise Exports from India Scheme (MEIS), export items with high domestic content and value addition have generally been provided higher level of rewards.
(iii) For reward schemes and duty exemption schemes, hard copies of applications and specified documents which were required to be submitted earlier have now been dispensed with.
(iv) Landing documents of export consignment as proof for notified market, can now be digitally uploaded.
(v) There will be no need to submit copies of permanent records/ documents repeatedly with each application, once the same are uploaded in Exporter/Importer Profile.
(vi) For faster and paperless communication with various Committees of DGFT, dedicated e-mail addresses have been provided for various Committees, e.g. Norms Committees, Exim Facilitation Committee etc.
The Foreign Trade Policy 2015-2020 introduces two new schemes, namely, ‘Merchandise Exports from India Scheme’ (MEIS) for incentivising export of specified goods to specified markets and ‘Services Exports from India Scheme’ (SEIS) for increasing exports of notified services from India. The scrips can be used for payment of customs duty, excise duty and service tax. All duty credit scrips issued under both the schemes and the goods imported against these scrips are fully transferable. Further, e-Commerce exports of certain specified employment creating sectors, made through courier or foreign post offices, have been supported under MEIS.This information was given by the Minister of State (Independent Charge) in the Ministry of Commerce & Industry Smt. Nirmala Sitharaman in a written reply in Rajya Sabha.
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