Worried about the rather poor performance on the export front in the current fiscal so far, Hegde was emphatic that several decisions taken by the revenue department, particularly those relating to levy of excise on raw materials vis-a-vis finished goods, were "illogical".

Hegde was taking a cue from Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee's criticism of bureaucracy which he said was still attuned to the British Raj at the export award function in the capital recently.

What prompted the commerce minister to question the wisdom of the revenue department's decisions was the higher rates of excise duty charged by it on raw materials vis-a-vis those on finished goods both of which had a greatbearing on export.

Continuing his broadside on the finance ministry, Hegde made it abundantly clear that "earning revenue" is as important for running the government as earning foreign exchange. He said, "The revenue department and the finance minister should not think that only revenue earning is their responsibility. Exports will also help the country earn foreign exchange for the country".

Without earning foreign exchange, "How will we pay for the goods that we import for export purposes," Hegde pointed out.

Earlier, the commerce minister explained that at the time of announcing changes in the Exim policy for 1997-2002, he was aiming at an export growth of 20 per cent during the current fiscal.

However, he noted that the south Asian crisis had created insurmountable difficulties for India's exports, adding that if "We had survived the crisis or the consequences of it, it is because of the strong fundamentals of our economy".

Many Asian tigers had been swept away because of the crisis and thecommerce minister had hoped that the crisis would blow over. He, however, admitted that his hopes that the crisis would be over had been belied and in fact it continued, though its rigours might have been mitigated.

He said the result was that all the countries including China which had achieved very high rate of export growth had to scale down their targets. China had lowered its export target to 15 per cent initially and to 5 per cent later.

What had compounded matters was the world trade had grown only by 5 per cent and therefore his calculations had either been misplaced or gone wrong.