Last year, service exports of $13.2 bn made up fully 26.7 per cent of India's total exports of $49.7 bn, according to a paper by Dr Kalyan Raipuria, adviser in the Ministry of Commerce.

As the chart shows, the boom has occurred chiefly from 1997. The paper notes that it is closely linked to the recent over 50 per cent growth in software exports.

How impressive this proportion is can be made out from comparisons with a range of developed and developing countries. The share of service exports in total world exports itself is less than 20 per cent.

In China (11.1 per cent in 1998) and the South East Asian countries barring the Philippines, the share of service exports to the total ranges between 10 and 20 per cent.

Hong Kong and Singapore export services worth just 16 and 14 per cent of their total exports, Japan only 15.6 per cent. Germany is still lower at 12.8 per cent, though service exports both in the US and the UK are over 26 per cent of the total.

There are other notable positives in the growth of Indian service exports. For one, their share in total exports grew by 3.6 per cent between 1990-98 when the share of world service exports grew by less than 1 per cent.

This was at a time when the share of service exports declined in countries from Thailand, Ireland and Singapore to Malaysia and South Korea. A further positive factor is that services other than travel and transport made up more than 57 per cent of India's total service exports. The only major developing countries to match or surpass this, the paper notes, are Malaysia, Turkey and Brazil.

Across from China, South Korea and Thailand to Poland, Mexico, South Africa and Russia, the share of tourism and transport service exports is much higher than in India.