Apparel Online India Magazine March 1st Issue 2019 | Page 96

INDUSTRY LIVE
Exporters can now be trained and mentored
‘anytime, anywhere'!
The Government has come up with
a new online course ‘anytime,
anywhere’ to train, mentor and
hand-hold potential exporters so
as to help them tap international
trade opportunities. This course
has been funded under the ‘Niryat
Bandhu’ scheme of Director
General Foreign Trade (DGFT)
and is in collaboration with
the Indian Institute of Foreign
Trade, New Delhi. On successful
completion, a Certificate in Export
Import Management under the
same scheme will be awarded to
participants.
Commerce & Industry Minister
Suresh Prabhu recently launched
the course and a mobile app of
DGFT, at a recent meeting of the
Board of Trade (BoT) in Delhi.
The meeting was attended by
Commerce Secretary; Secretary
DPIIT; DGFT, Secretaries and
other senior officials of key line
ministries including Finance and
Agriculture, all major trade and
industry bodies, Export Promotion
Councils and industrialists.
Exporters can now log in their
grievances, apply for various
licenses, view their status using
the mobile app of DGFT, besides
accessing information about latest
trade notices, circulars, Foreign
Trade Policy (FTP) and trade fairs.
On this occasion, DGFT Alok
Chaturvedi, made a detailed
Commerce & Industry Minister Suresh Prabhu launching the course
presentation explaining the
present export scenario and
various initiatives taken. Few
notable measures taken since
last BoT meetings were also
mentioned.
Centre to start textiles' trend forecasting
The Centre is planning to start
trend forecasting for the textile
sector. Also, it will be using
commercial intelligence to identify
what could be in style in near
future, as the country is gearing
up to influence global fashion
trends, a top official confirmed.
Raghvendra Singh, Secretary,
Ministry of Textiles, also said
that the ministry along with
export promotion councils was
firming up schemes for clothing
and made-ups sectors which are
WTO-compliant.
time that we became influencers,”
he added. He pointed out that
India was unable to compete in
apparel exports because of zero
duty access in countries like
Bangladesh and Vietnam.
“In the past 1-2 months, we
have managed with the help
of the Ministry of Commerce
and Industry and Revenue
(Department), and we are trying
to take care of WTO-compliance,
which is obviously an issue now.
These things will obviously
be added incentives for the
exporters, which will allow
them to compete with the EU
and other countries also,”
Singh added. The Textiles
Secretary also assured that
there are more incentives in
the pipeline for the industry
under the Merchandise Exports
from India Scheme. At the same
time, he said, an innovation and
incubation centre is also being
“This project has been sanctioned
and will be set up soon, which
basically means that all the
commercial intelligence in this
sector can be used for forecasting
the trends in six months or a year.
This will lead to a big change,
which is the need of the hour,”
he said.
“We are actually getting
influenced by international trends.
The kind of punch we have seen in
the textiles sector, it is now high
Raghvendra Singh, Secretary, Ministry of Textiles interacting with the media
96 Apparel Online India | MARCH 1-15, 2019 | www.apparelresources.com
set up, which will incubate start-
ups in the sector and hand-hold
them to move forward. In the
technical textiles sector and
in case of speciality fibres, the
Centre has been thinking in
terms of joint ventures with
other countries, and for this,
one-on-one talk is on. The
Government will make more
announcements within this
month for the technical textiles
sector, he declared.