Rubber planters welcome govt move to reduce export window to 6 months

The Commerce Ministry move to reduce the time window of exports to six months, in the case of the Rubber Advance License Import Scheme, will go a long way in stabilising sagging domestic rubber prices.

Union Commerce Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, earlier this week, announced the move to reduce the export window from the current 18 months to six months in the interest of the domestic rubber growers. Various grower federations and United Planters’ Association of Southern India (UPASI) had been seeking structural changes in the import policy for a long time and have appreciated the Commerce Ministry’s latest decision.

“Currently, the window of exports is 18 months, extendable by six months of two durations. This is illogical when it is an established fact that the quality of natural rubber deteriorates after six months. A long time window makes the monitoring mechanism cumbersome and is not in line with the spirit of import for re-export cause. All this had added to a higher than required import and retention in the domestic market,” N Dharmaraj, Vice-President, UPASI, said in a statement.

A total quantity of 400,000 tonnes of rubber was imported duty free between 2011 and 2013. This forms almost 52 per cent of the imported quantity of rubber during these years. Moreover, a close look at the import data also indicates that the imports of natural rubber has increased from 77,800 tonnes in 2008-09 to 360,000 tonnes in 2013-14, an increase of 208 per cent.

Such high imports, in volumes much above the gap between production and consumption had depressed domestic prices, Dharmarajan said.

With the same objective in mind, UPASI has also asked the government to review the outdated norms of Standard Input Output Norm (SION) and issues of inverted duty structure in rubber goods industry to enable the robust growth of the rubber goods manufacturing sector in the country, he added.