Soon, India to hold Dubai-like mega shopping festivals

Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Saturday announced Dubai-like mega shopping festivals across four destinations in India to facilitate exchange between global producers and consumers.The steps to promote exports comes at a time the government intends to more than triple the country's annual exports to $1 trillion in the next five years. Annual mega shopping festivals in India will be organised in four places across March 2020 in four themes gems and jewellery, handicrafts and textiles, tourism and yoga. FM said the government would work towards enabling the handicrafts industry to effectively harness e-commerce for exports through the special dispensation for facilitating an on-boarding handicrafts artisans and handicraft cooperatives directly on e-commerce portals and enable seamless exports.Sitharaman also announced a "Free Trade Agreement (FTA) utilisation mission" headed by a senior official in the department of commerce. This aims to "work exclusively with FIEO and export houses to utilise concessional tariffs in each FTA and enhance awareness of preferential duty benefits among MSMEs, disseminate and facilitate compliance requirement under FTAs for importers and exporters."In order to further improve the ease of doing business and exports, she announced an online origin management system in the coming weeks for exporters to enable them to "obtain certificates of origin (CoO) under rules of origin". Furthermore, the government will release an action plan to reduce turnaround time at airports and ports benchmarked to international standards to be implemented by December.