Exporters want a level playing field from FM

Walking the tight rope has become a way of life for the Indian exporters. They are either battling a strong rupee or fighting the rising input cost. When problem on both these front seem to ease, a new set of problem hits them. It is either some international market collapsing or interest rates hardening.

Clearly, the Indian exporters are in an unenviable situation. Given the scenario what should Indian exporters expect from the Finance Minister (FM) in the forthcoming budget?

CNBC-TV18's AB Ravi sat down with Ramu Deora, president FIEO; Ashank Desai, founder, Mastek; Sunil Khandelwal, CFO, Alok Industries and RS Subramanian, country manager at DHL to discuss the issue.

According to Deora exporters only want a level-playing field. “We only want from honourable FM to give us a level-playing field like what our counterpart China is getting — whether it is in infrastructure, cost of money, transport cost and other transaction costs. If we ask for the same level-playing field, we don’t want anything.”

Acknowledging the view Desai said a large number of countries today look at exports as one of the strategic arm of the economy and make all the efforts to see that it is flourishing or thriving in whatever form. “Some of it may be incentive and some of it may be nothing to do with incentives. China is a good example. Their export to gross domestic product (GDP) ratio is much higher — maybe two times higher than ours. So we have not reached today a maturity level in terms of our export potential. If you had reached then we could have said we are okay.”

“As we have to go further in terms of maturity at least we have to double our ratio of export to GDP, which means that there is a chance or there is a possibility of unleashing our potential,” he said.

He felt incentive is one of the ways of doing it. “There are other things, which are about level-playing field because we do not have same level-playing field as many other countries.”

According to Khandelwal exporters need a level-playing field in terms of the entire infrastructure or the transaction cost. “If that is being given, I am sure nobody wants those incentives from the government.”

Meanwhile, Subramanian said “Our exporters need to be globally competitive. For them to be competitive we need strong infrastructure creation, we need our transaction cost to come down. So that we become globally competitive and more importantly, there is a host of regulations which can be simplified.”