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The outlook for India’s exports is brightening as underneath the subdued growth profile of the past few months, the country has been gaining a share in global trade of key manufacturing items, according to the RBI bulletin for November. 

“In fact, India currently holds 13 per cent or a sixth of the global market share in petroleum products, attesting to rising refining capabilities and ability to meet international standards,” the report states.

It is the largest exporter of precious and semi-precious stones, the third largest exporter of insecticides, the eighth largest in rubber pneumatic tyres, and the ninth in semiconductors.

In the first half of 2024-25, Apple exported close to US $6 billion of India-made iPhones, while automobile exports expanded by 14.3 per cent, led by passenger vehicles and two-wheelers, the RBI report added.

Export restrictions on several items have been lifted. Efforts are being intensified to expand the number of geographical indication (GI) products to scale up overall exports and secure premium pricing in global markets. Already, more than 1,100 GI products are registered under the one-district-one-product (ODOP) scheme, with 640 of them being exported out of a global total of close to 70,000 GI products, the report points out.

It also states that there is some urgency gathering around evolving a standardised approach to negotiating free trade agreements (FTAs) to address rules of origin and non-tariff barriers.

A panoply of bilateral agreements will enable India to capitalise on the ‘China plus one’ trend in global manufacturing. The key is to improve market access as over the last five years, it is estimated that India’s total imports from FTA partners (ASEAN, the 2 UAE, SAFTA, Australia, South Korea, Japan, Mauritius) increased by 37.9 per cent while exports grew only 14.5 per cent, according to the RBI report.

India is undergoing a quiet transformation in its logistics for maritime trade which accounts for 95 per cent of India’s trade by volume and 65 per cent by value. Port capacity has more than doubled over the past ten years from 745 million tonnes to over 1,600 million tonnes. Traffic at major ports has jumped by close to 50 per cent. Turnaround time has fallen from 127 hours in 2010 to 53 hours more recently, with only 21 hours in Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust (JNPT) at Nhava Sheva. Over this period, India’s position in the World Bank’s logistics performance index has risen from 54th to 38th, the report highlights.