India revisits its ₹25,060 crore Export Promotion Mission amid limited uptake, prompting calls for greater simplification and outreach to meet ambitious $2 trillion export target by 2030-31.
New Delhi is preparing to revisit parts of India’s ₹25,060 crore Export Promotion Mission after the package failed to attract broad demand beyond its best-known finance and market-support tools, an awkward result for a flagship scheme meant to help push the country towards $2 trillion in exports by 2030-31. Business Standard, citing officials, said exporters had shown substantial interest in only two schemes, although a government review in April referred to 10 components already being operationalised. At that meeting, Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal told officials that the benefits had to reach exporters on the ground, especially MSMEs and first-time sellers abroad.
The mission was approved by the Union Cabinet on 12 November 2025 and then rolled out in stages. Official material from January described three early interventions, while Goyal launched seven more on 20 February 2026. Together they were presented as a six-year framework running from FY 2025-26 to FY 2030-31, bringing older, fragmented support under two umbrellas: Niryat Protsahan for trade finance and Niryat Disha for market access and compliance. That structure matters, because the parts proving easiest to use are largely those that exporters already understood from earlier schemes.
One of those familiar pillars is Market Access Support. Guidelines issued on 31 December 2025 set aside ₹4,531 crore for that arm of the mission over FY 2025-26 to FY 2030-31, including ₹500 crore in the first year, to help fund trade fairs, exhibitions, buyer-seller meets and trade delegations. Moneycontrol reported that the scheme would be routed through government bodies, export promotion councils, trade associations and industry groups. It also said priority sectors ranging from tourism, healthcare and logistics to agriculture, marine goods, handicrafts, AYUSH, telecom, defence and emerging technologies would receive an 80:20 cost-sharing formula. Events supported under the scheme must have at least 35 per cent MSME participation, and assistance is generally limited to two delegates per firm for each event.
The other part that appears to have translated most easily is interest support on export credit. A Trade Connect newsroom note dated 7 January said the government would offer a base 2.75 per cent subvention on eligible pre- and post-shipment rupee export credit for notified tariff lines, capped at ₹50 lakh per Import Exporter Code in FY 2025-26. The same note made clear, however, that both the subvention scheme and the collateral guarantee were being piloted before full-scale implementation. A DGFT trade notice dated 16 January then amended the rules for “operational clarity and certainty”, stating that the benefit was available only to eligible MSME exporters and aligning qualifying credit with the Reserve Bank of India’s consolidated directions on credit facilities. In other words, the most popular scheme was still being fine-tuned almost as soon as it started.
The less familiar parts of the mission are more specialised and, in several cases, more operationally demanding. At the February launch, the government added a direct e-commerce credit facility of up to ₹50 lakh backed by a 90 per cent guarantee, alongside an overseas inventory credit facility of up to ₹5 crore with 75 per cent guarantee cover and 2.75 per cent interest support capped at ₹15 lakh a year. Export factoring was also brought in with 2.75 per cent subvention, limited to ₹50 lakh per MSME annually, for transactions routed through RBI- or IFSCA-recognised entities. On the non-financial side, the TRACE compliance scheme offered reimbursement of 60 per cent for certifications on a positive list and 75 per cent on a priority list, subject to an annual ceiling of ₹25 lakh. FLOW, the overseas warehousing and fulfilment intervention, promised support of up to 30 per cent of approved project costs over three years.
That breadth helps explain why ministers have treated execution as a management problem as much as a budgetary one. When Goyal reviewed the mission on 29 April 2026, the commerce ministry said India was working towards a $2 trillion export target by 2030-31, split evenly between merchandise and services. It said the department had already built an export-monitoring framework covering engineering goods, textiles, electronics, pharmaceuticals, chemicals and services. Goyal asked for each sectoral action to be tied to timelines and key performance indicators under a named nodal joint secretary. He also called for a rolling three-year calendar of trade fairs and buyer-seller meets, a stronger push for agricultural exports, wider use of field-level organisations in market-access work, and more attention to warehousing, certification and “Brand India”.
The mission’s architecture has also continued to move after launch. In a notice reported by The Economic Times on 7 August, the commerce ministry shifted the interest-subvention arm from a pilot arrangement run through the Reserve Bank to Export-Import Bank of India, with effect from 1 April 2026. EXIM Bank was given responsibility for operationalisation, portal management, verification and claim settlement, while supplementary claims from participating banks for the January-March 2026 quarter were left with the RBI. That was not presented as a policy U-turn, but it did show that the administrative plumbing of the mission was still being reworked several months into its life.
Officials have insisted from the start that the mission is not meant simply to recycle old subsidies under a new label. Ajay Bhadoo, director general of foreign trade, said when the market-access rules were issued that the wider objective was to make trade finance easier and diversify exports into newer and emerging markets. The review now under way will test whether that ambition survives contact with the practical experience of exporters. If firms continue to gravitate only to the two schemes they already recognise, the government may have to simplify eligibility, widen access and sharpen outreach before the rest of the mission can claim to be more than a well-funded design.
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