Transforming districts into export hubs
NEW DELHI : Recently, the Reserve Bank of India reduced its benchmark policy rate, with the RBI Governor highlighting declining exports as a key area of concern. Over the past decade (FY15 to FY25), India’s merchandise exports have grown at a CAGR of just 3.4 per cent. Labour-intensive sectors such as textiles and apparel, gems and jewellery, leather products, and agricultural goods have expanded at an even slower pace of 2-2.5 per cent, while high-value electronics and automobiles have largely buoyed the overall export basket.
For mass employment, accelerating growth in these traditional sectors is crucial. India’s District as Export Hub (DEH) policy is a strategic vision to boost labour-intensive exports and job creation by leveraging each district’s unique skills and products. It aligns with India’s aspiration to expand the country’s share in global manufactured trade flows, by adopting a hyper local focus. With targeted infrastructure, institutional support, and global market access, it can transform local strengths into export competitiveness. While in principle, DEH initiative is one of the most promising pathways for generating jobs where populations reside, ground realities reveal a starkly different picture.
The first bottleneck is the absence of reliable and comprehensive exporter databases at the district level. Export Promotion Bureaus (EPBs) at the State level maintain lists only of those exporters who are registered with them. But this represents only a fraction of the actual exporter universe. For Uttar Pradesh this figure is 25-30 per cent. The Directorate General of Foreign Trade (DGFT), which maintains the most accurate and exhaustive list of import-export certificate (IEC) holders, does not share district-wise exporter data with EPBs, and consequently, districts remain effectively blind. This systemic data gap makes evidence-based hyper-local and focused policy-making virtually impossible. How can a district be groomed into an export hub when the State government and EPBs do not know who its exporters are, what they produce, or what challenges they face?