Export figure promising; sector on path of revival

: Continuous positive growth since the last five months in the current fiscal provides good hope that the export sector was in the path of revival, Regional Chairman, Federation of India Exporters Organisation (FIEO) Southern Region, A Shaktivel said here today.
Reacting to the export performance for January, he said the positive growth, coming after two years of consecutive negative growth, was the result of various steps taken by the Government, including special packages for textile and leather sector, interest equalization scheme announced for five years.
After lowest growth during 2016, world trade expected to be better in 2017 and 2018, especially the markets of emerging economies.

However, globally prices of all products were coming down and there was a big challenge for Indian manufacturing products for continuing competitive especially labour oriented products like textiles and garments, Leather, Engineering, he said in a release here.
Shaktivel requested the Commerce Ministry to consider the present market situation and extend better facilities to exporters while doing the Midterm review of Foreign Trade Policy.
On uncertainty surrounding U.S. Trade policies, he said India can compete in labour intensive sectors like textiles and garments, leather products, engineering, pharma and handicrafts in that market as the country has advantages of availability of raw material and efficient and skilled labour.

There was an urgent need for product diversification for aiming higher export growth, he said and cited the example of the textile sector, where emerging demand in the world was for the technical textiles sector .
However India has only a few exporters in this field and FIEO was in talks with various agencies to set up technical textile clusters in Tamil Nadu, where common facilities including R and D facilities can be provided to start ups, Sakthivel added.