The Foreign Trade Policy (FTP) 2021-26 was due to be released last year but got postponed given the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. While India, for varied reasons, could not achieve its FTP 2015 target of US $900 billion by 2020, the mid-term revision of US $1 trillion by 2024 also does not seem realistic.
Anxieties
Absolute data in terms of exports shows that there has been an increase in India’s exports in the last two decades as it increased from US $44 billion in 2001, to US $220 billion in 2010, to US $323 billion in 2019 (the pandemic been an outlier in 2020).
While there has been export growth during the second decade of the century, it was largely been flat as compared to the first, which merits some concern. In fact, in 2001, India’s share in global exports stood at 0.7 percent, which doubled to touch 1.5 percent in 2010, but remained fairly around the same level in 2019 at 1.7 percent. The percentage of GDP exports has further fallen from 17 percent in 2011 to 12.4 percent in 2018.