Exim policy lifts restrictions on exports
New Delhi: The government has announced a new 5-year Exim policy, removing all quantitative and procedural hurdles to achieve 80 billion dollars annual exports by 2007. Coterminus with the Tenth Five-Year Plan, the policy announced by commerce minister Maran also improved export incentive schemes like the popular duty entitlement passbook, advance licence and export promotion credit guarantee, besides giving transport assistance for agri-exports.

The 2002-07 policy seeks to diversify markets with new programmes for exports to Africa and CIS countries and provides more benefits to industrial clusters, cottage and handicrafts exports and hardware sector.

We propose to remove all quantitative restrictions on exports except a few sensitive items. Only a few items have been retained for exporting through state trading enterprises, Maran said.

The policy removes several restrictions on agriculure exports including registration and packaging requirement for items like butter, wheat and wheat products, coarse grains, groundnut oil and cashew to Russia.

Restrictions on export of all cultivated varieties of seed, except jute and onions have also been removed besides providing transport subsidy to exports of fruits, vegetables, floriculture, poultry, and dairy products.

The changes in respect of advance licence included abolition of duty exemption entitlement certificate, withdrawal of annual advance licence scheme and permission to exporters to avail advance licences for any value.

Some of the sector specific packages in the policy include reduction of customs duty on import of rough diamonds to zero per cent, abolition of licensing regime for rough diamonds, reduction in value addition norms for export of plain jewellery at a value addition of 3 per cent and extension of duty free imports for trimmings and embellishments up to 3 per cent job value.
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India to adopt new commodity classification
New Delhi: India will soon adopt the new commodity classification for imports and exports.

This classification shall be adopted by central board of excise and customs (CBEC) and director general of commercial intelligence and statistics (DGCI&S) shortly.

The common classification, to be used by director general of foreign trade (DGFT) and CBEC, would eliminate the classification of dispute and hence reduce transaction costs and time.
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