The recently reconstituted Board of Trade under the commerce ministry will meet for the first time on August 10 to discuss the new foreign trade policy as well as the ongoing slowdown in exports. The new board, which advises the ministry on foreign trade issues, is chaired by Commerce Minister Anand Sharma, and includes 12 top-notch industrialists as non-official members such as Wipro chairman Azim Premzi, Mahindra and Mahindra managing director Anand Mahindra and Hero Honda’s Pawan Munjal.
The Board, which was earlier chaired by Aditya Birla group chairman Kumar Mangalam Birla, is expected to throw up some direction and inputs for the new Foreign Trade Policy to be announced in mid-August.
The new board also has some ex-officio members, which includes president of Confederation of Indian Industry, Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, head of FIEO, Nasscom, and 10 other export promotion councils. In the Board’s last avatar, these were non-official members of the board.
?Exports are expected to pick up from about November, if remaining demands of exporters like income tax holiday is given. We will flag the pending demands of exporters in the meeting,? said A Sakthivel, president of Federation of Indian Export Organisations.
Official members of the board include the secretaries of commerce, revenue, shipping, external affairs, among others. Moreover, chairman of Export Credit Guarantee Corporation, managing director of EXIM Bank, chairman and managing director of State Bank of India and managing director of Container Corporation of India Ltd are also official members of the board.
Exports from the country have been in the negative territory for nine consecutive months ending June, 2009 due to weak demand in overseas markets like United States and Europe.
Non-Official members of BoT
Onkar S Kanwar, CMD, Apollo Tyres
Pawan Mumjal, MD, Hero Honda Motors
Ramesh Chandra, CMD, Unitech,
Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, CMD, Biocon,
Satish Reddy, MD, Reddy?s Lab,
Azim H Premji, Chairman, WIPRO,
Habil Khorakiwala, Chairman, Wockhardt Ltd,
Sanjay Kirloskar, MD, Kirloskar Ltd
Anand Mahindra, MD, M&M Ltd,
YC Deveshwar, Chairman, ITC,
Saroj Kumar Poddar, Chairman, Poddar Heritage Enterprises
Sanjay Bansal, Chairman, Darjeeling Tea Association
