The ministry of commerce and the finance ministry have scheduled back-to-back meetings with exporters on November 14 and 15 respectively to discuss additional sops to sectors hit by rising rupee.
Some exporters had recently met Prime Minister?s economic advisory council chairman C Rangarajan, who in turn asked them to submit a detailed list of their demands and also the damage caused by currency appreciation, in terms of monetary and job losses.
Sources said, Rangarajan is likely to meet exporters once again in the third week of this month for further discussions. The rupee has appreciated by over 12% since January this year. It stood at around Rs 39.40 against the US dollar on Thursday.
Several export promotion councils, including bodies from sectors like textiles, leather and handicrafts, which have witnessed about 50% drop in exports, have asked the finance ministry to further hike duty entitlement passbook (DEPB) and drawback rates to help them counter the strengthening currency.
Confederation of Indian Textile Industry (CITI) secretary general DK Nair said, the textile industry has so far lost about 35,000 jobs and if the government does not provide immediate relief, around 4-5 lakh people would lose jobs by March 2008.
He said the industry has asked the government to provide pre and post-shipment credit at 6% and extend the pre-shipment credit from the current three months to one year. ?Internationally, this credit is available to all our competitors at less than 6%,? Nair said.
CITI has also demanded that the Centre should refund all state duties?including electricity duty, octroi, entry tax and mandi, which totals up to 6% of the free-on-board value of exports. ?This can be returned and it will not flout WTO norms,? he said.
Export Promotion Council for Handicrafts chairman Navrattan Samdaria said, the handicrafts sector, which employs around 6 million people, had to cut 30% of workers and about 100 factories across the country have already closed shop. He added that the job losses would go upto 60% by March 2008, when the full picture of the rupee appreciation emerges.
?We need an instant package. Even if the government hikes drawback and DEPB rates, it would not be applicable to most of the items in our sector. Also, our sector has negligible import content. Therefore, the government should refund upto 5% of the money we use for marketing purposes,? he said. Similarly, exporters estimate that sectors like carpet, leather and cottage industries would see about 5-10% job losses this fiscal.