Ranga Reddy, a district neighbouring Hyderabad and home to companies of varying sizes across industries, offers scope for enhancing exports in many sectors, including medical devices, processed food, agri and spices, seed as well as defence and aerospace.
The room for improvement exists in various sectors, Federation of Indian Export Organisations Joint Director P.T. Srinath said, adding exports from Ranga Reddy during April-October 2021 totalled a little over $1 billion.
The FIEO Telangana Head was speaking at a meeting held as part of the District as Export Hub series, for Rangareddy, with the objective to seek views of exporters, especially challenges they face, and addressing them in association with the State and district administration.
The launch of the meeting series follows the Centre’s emphasis on turning districts into export hubs by engaging States actively in export promotion activities.
“Earlier, export promotion was dealt by only Central government without any active, credible mechanism involving the State or district-level stakeholders into the decision making process to promote goods and services produced at the grassroots level. This has to be decentralised to boost local production and make districts active stakeholders in driving export growth of local products/services. Such a move will help filling the existing gaps and [addressing] bottlenecks in exporting the identified products/services from the districts,” FIEO said in a release on the meeting.
The objective is to also enable MSMEs and farmers tap the export opportunities and thereby, for the country, to shift focus on a district-led export growth for self-sufficiency and self- reliance. Such a move would attract investment to boost manufacturing and exports and facilitate growth of an ecosystem for innovation and use of technology at the district-level to make exporters competitive, FIEO said.
Inaugurating the meeting, Deputy Director General of Foreign Trade, Hyderabad, K. Hrushikesh Reddy said meeting is to improve exports of key products from the districts and to collect feedback from the industry on measures to improve exports. Union Commerce Ministry, he said, is keen on promoting exports by addressing infrastructural issues as opposed to an approach of offering incentives to exporters. Since direct subsidies result in inefficiencies, the Centre wants to utilise the funds earmarked, for incentives, for various projects such testing labs being set up at the district-level for the exporters.
Deputy General Manager (SME) of State Bank of India Sudhanshu Das said SBI is keen on financing MSMEs and thus enhance exports. “Tell us where we can improve and contribute to the aim of India becoming a $5 trillion economy,” he said.
