Foreign Trade Policy 2015-20

- The Foreign Trade Policy (FTP) 2015-20 was the Government of India on April 1, 2015. Following are the highlights of the FTP:
  - FTP 2015-20 provides a framework for increasing exports of goods and services as well as generation of employment and increasing value addition in the country, in line with the ‘Make in India’ programme.
  - The Policy aims to enable India to respond to the challenges of the external environment, keeping in step with a rapidly evolving international trading architecture and make trade a major contributor to the country’s economic growth and development.
  - FTP 2015-20 introduces two new schemes, namely ‘Merchandise Exports from India Scheme (MEIS)’ for export of specified goods to specified markets and ‘Services Exports from India Scheme (SEIS)’ for increasing exports of notified services. Duty credit scrips issued under MEIS and SEIS and the goods imported against these scrips are fully transferable.

Last year, the government replaced the MEIS by introducing the Remission of Duties and Taxes on Exported Products (RoDTEP) scheme. This new scheme reimburses currently un-refunded Central, State, and Local taxes and duties incurred in the process of manufacture and distribution of exported products in a way that is compliant with the WTO norms.

- Measures have been taken to give a boost to exports of defense and hi-tech items.
- 108 MSME clusters have been identified for focused interventions to boost exports. Accordingly, ‘Niryat Bandhu Scheme’ has been galvanised and repositioned to achieve the objectives of ‘Skill India’.
- Trade facilitation and enhancing the ease of doing business are the other major focus areas in this new FTP.
- One of the major objectives of the new FTP is to move towards paperless working in a 24×7 environment.

The government has extended the tenure of the Foreign Trade Policy 2015-20 by another six months till March 2023, instead of replacing it with a new policy by September 30 as it had envisaged, citing requests from industry bodies amid the turmoil in the global economy.
The policy was first extended on March 31, 2020 for a year due to the pandemic and the lockdown imposed to control its spread.

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