The central government is trying to formulate a scheme that will help create export infrastructure, commerce and industry minister Nirmala Sitharaman said on Thursday.

“As almost all the states had expressed their wish for a central scheme which supports export infrastructure, we have acted on your suggestion and are trying to formulate a scheme which could provide financial support and supplement your efforts to create export infrastructure,” said the minister.

“I hope we can soon succeed in achieving a consensus for the roll out of this scheme, which is very aptly titled as TIES or Trade Infrastructure for Export Scheme. This would surely strengthen our TIES with the states,” she added.

At a meeting of Council for Trade Development and Promotion, the minister said that though, since last January we have managed to contain our trade deficit due to controls on imports, there is an immediate need to synergize our efforts and jointly take appropriate steps to boost India’s exports - which is the only sustainable way in today’s international trade environment

“As you already know, there is a slowdown in world economy which has resulted in decrease in some of India’s traditional exports,” she added.

She exhorted the states to  enhance their co-operation with central agencies for setting up common facilities like testing labs, training institutes as well as packaging and storage support to industry.

“States have also been requested to develop their export strategy aligned with the National Policy trade. So far, 17 states have prepared their export strategy.  I request the balance states to kindly expedite their export strategies.”

She added that “our services trade surplus offsets our merchandise trade deficit to an extent and along with overseas remittances, keeps our current account deficit in check. While IT and IT enabled services have an overwhelming predominance in our services exports, these are largely restricted to the US and EU markets and are therefore vulnerable to any changes imposed by these two trading blocks. There is thus a need to diversify our services exports basket by enabling more sectors and to breach more markets.”

Read highlights of the foreign trade policy 2015-2020