City exporters seek more incentives from Centre

Ludhiana: Facing tough competition from their international counterparts, city based exporters have now urged the Centre to increase the incentives received on exports. The businessmen are of the view this will help them boost exports from the city and the nation, as they are currently surviving on thin margins due to tough competition.
Saying that the industrial city has a huge export potential, Ludhiana based businessmen rue this could only be encashed if international trade is made more attractive by hiking the existing incentives.
Rohit Gupta, president of Importer Exporter Club of Punjab said, “In wake of our shrinking profit margins due to the rising expenditures on account of hike in charges for labour, freight and raw material, we are facing a very tough time. At this moment we are avoiding increasing the rates of our products for our international customers, but it does not seems possible for us to keep working at the same rates for too long.”
Asking the Union government to extend its support to the industry, Gupta demanded to increase the duty drawback to at least 3% for the exporters, regardless the nature of the goods.
Businessmen also rue that incentives being provided in our neighbouring nations are more than that here.
Harish Kairpal, a city based garment exporter and president of Ludhiana MSME Associationc said, “Indian exporters are facing tough competition from other nations, especially the neighbouring countries because the rate of incentives being offered by their governments is more than double than here. Despite this edge to them, we are still managing to do business but it is not possible to work on such thin margins forever. In case we increase the rates of our products, we risk losing the orders and therefore the best alternative is financial support from the Centre to the exporters.”
Former president of Small Scale Manufacturers’ Association at Daba Road, Amarjit Singh Chauhan said, “Ludhiana’s industry, especially the auto parts, sewing machine, bicycle, hand tools and garment industry, has a huge export potential.”
He added only a few of the city’s MSMEs have been able to export their goods due to low rate of incentives, and asked the Centre to hence increase them to double for at least a period of two years on an experimental basis.