IRIS analysts said the growth rate projected by the Directorate General of Commercial Intelligence and Statistics (DGCIS) is on account of a downward revision in the value of exports for 1997-98 from $33,980 million to $32,441 million. The revised figures were arrived at recently and a year after projecting earlier estimate, IRIS said.

The growth rate, if one goes by the earlier estimate is negative one per cent, IRIS said.

The DGCIS release puts the export figures for 1997-98 at $32,441 million, a sharp fall from the earlier estimated $33,980 million for that year. The 1998-99 export value is $33,641 million. According to IRIS, the revised 1997-98 figure was announced by the DGCIS after the 1998-99 figures were arrived at, thus indicatinga positive trend at 3.7 per cent.

The DGCIS release also does not substantiate for the new downward export value of 1997-98 and the growth rate of 1998-99 is pushed up as a consequence of this adjustment. However, the DGCIS has decided to maintain the previous growth rate of 2.64 per cent (in 1997-98) in its latest release, only mentioning revisions being undertaken in a footnote.

An important point is that the figures given are unadjusted trade figures, incorporating the late returns of previous months. Analysts at IRIS point out that the export value of a particular month may be revised later due to late returns of the previous months, and that is usually the reason for frequent revisions of trade data. But what is surprising is the `downward' revision of March 1998 figures has come in twelve months after the original publication of the data. In simple terms, it means that DGCIS took a whole year to account for the fact that export earnings which were supposed to have come in by 1997-98, were notrealised to the extent expected.

It may also be recalled that the Union Commerce Minister, Ramkrishna Hegde, during the annual amendments to the Exim Policy on March 31, 1999, stated that the export growth rate over April-January 1998-99 was 0.41 per cent in dollar terms. For the same period, the DGCIS data states a growth rate of -1.98 percent.

What is strange is while DGCIS export growth rate in dollar terms does not tally with the ministry estimates, the same export growth when denominated in rupees (at 12%) is at par with ministry estimates. According to DGCIS India's exports in rupee terms were Rs 117524.98 crores, Rs 120614.28 crores and Rs 141603.53 crores for the years 1996-97, 1997-98 and 1998-99 respectively.

India's exports during March 1999 were registered to be $3395.66 million, 10.07 per cent higher than exports of March 19998 at $3085.06 million. In rupee terms the exports were higher by 18.28 per cent at Rs 14414.12 crores during the same months.