India to reinstate tax refund benefits for exporters from June to boost competitiveness
NEW DELHI, May 27 (Reuters) - India will restore benefits under a key scheme that reimburses exporters for embedded duties, taxes, and levies not covered by any other government refund programme in an effort to boost export competitiveness, the trade ministry said on Tuesday.
The benefits under the Remission of Duties and Taxes on Exported Products were introduced on January 1, 2021, but ended on February 5 this year.
They will now be applicable for all eligible exports from June 1, covering sectors including textiles, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, cars, agriculture, and food processing, the ministry said in a statement.
"Their reinstatement is expected to provide a level playing field for exporters across sectors," the statement said, adding the scheme would use a digital platform "to ensure transparency and efficiency".
Total disbursements under the programme exceeded 579.77 billion Indian rupees ($7 billion) as of March 31, the ministry said.
The benefits were earlier paused to review the support required by exporters, an official who did not want to be named told Reuters.
"In the current environment, the government has felt the need to continue to give such benefits," the official said.
The announcement comes days after India clinched a trade agreement with Britain and as it races to seal a trade deal with the U.S. before the end of the 90-day pause on hefty additional import tariffs imposed by U.S. President Donald Trump.
($1 = 85.2520 Indian rupees)
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6 minutes ago
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‘Tell me what to ask about' — MP faces cash for questions claims
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An email appears to show that in one of these meetings he discussed various business objectives with the firm. Freeman, 57, who was first elected as an MP in 2010, resigned as science minister from Rishi Sunak's government in November 2023. He later complained he could not afford to pay his £2,000 a month mortgage on a ministerial salary of £118,300. In April last year, he began acting as a paid adviser to GHGSat Limited, which uses satellites and aircraft sensors to measure greenhouse gases, including methane, from industrial sites and helps businesses monitor and reduce their emissions. Freeman appears to have broken multiple rules set out in the MPs' code of conduct, including lobbying on behalf of a private company he was paid by and using the parliamentary estate for his private business interests. He also appears to have failed to follow the advice issued to him by the advisory committee on business appointments (Acoba), the watchdog that regulates the private sector roles ex-ministers and civil servants can take up after leaving office. Approached on Saturday, Freeman said that, while he did not believe he had done anything wrong, he was immediately referring himself to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, the watchdog responsible for policing MPs' conduct. As science and space minister, Freeman was heavily involved in the sector that GHGSat operates in, although he does not appear to have dealt with the firm while in office or presided over policies, regulation or commercial decisions that would have benefited it. He is now a member of the Commons science and technology committee, as well as a UK trade envoy. The company paid him £5,000 a month for eight hours of work between April last year and March this year. 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At 4.29pm, Wicks replied that Freeman should ask questions of the DSIT to better understand whether it would continue 'investment in national space data activities'. He then listed three specific areas he could ask about. The first was to ask the DSIT whether it would continue to invest in 'the Earth observation Data Pilot run by the Geospatial Commission and whether that will be extended or grown into a pan-government purchasing mechanism'. This was a government-run pilot launched in 2023, when Freeman was still science minister, which was testing ways public bodies could access satellite data to better inform 'analysis in key policy areas, including land use, environmental monitoring and emergency response'. Wicks's second proposal was for Freeman to ask the DSIT whether it planned to 'continue funding the Earth observation data hub as a tool for public sector to access and make use of different Earth observation data'. 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13 minutes ago
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Make a note of last Friday's date: June 27 2025. It was the day that Britain's coming financial crisis became inescapable. In backing away from his attempt to slow, however feebly, the rise in benefits spending, Sir Keir Starmer was signalling to the world that Labour would never bring Britain's budget back into balance. The storm might break in 2026 or 2027 or even later. Labour politicians will do everything in their power to postpone the reckoning. But debts are not just paper liabilities; they end up being recovered. We have all just watched a hopeless and hapless PM throw away his majority and, with it, any hope of reform. And the bond vigilantes saw what we saw. What were Labour's rebels thinking? Their constituents will be hammered when the money runs out, when salaries and savings lose their value and imports become luxuries. They will be swept from office just as surely as were Greece's socialist MPs after the euro crisis. Do they even believe their own claims? 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Spending a chunk of my teenage years in South America in the 1980s, I am perhaps more alive than some of my countrymen to what a debt crisis looks like. I have seen, not just the inflation, the unemployment, the poverty – but the consequent lurch into authoritarianism. If twentieth-century South America seems too exotic, cast your mind back instead to the euro crisis. Ireland took it best, gulping down its medicine and making serious economies. Public sector salaries were reduced in real terms and there were rounds of redundancies. From cabinet ministers to claimants of child benefit, everyone had to take a cut. I suspect that, under Labour, our crisis will be more Greek than Irish. In other words, we will continue to vote 'against the cuts'. Our politicians will raise taxes in ways that would have made Charles I blush. We will elect parties that promise to 'end austerity'. And, as a result, we will end up having to make deeper cuts. And Labour? Labour will go the way of Greece's PASOK, as voters blame it for having failed to make softer savings while there was still time. It is true that voters themselves are in no mood for such savings yet; but good luck with using that as an excuse. Starmer might manage to limp on until the next election, a prisoner of the 400 standard-issue big-government Labour MPs who want him to stick to the Corbynite policies on which he was elected party leader. Either way, Labour itself is finished. Last week will be remembered as the moment when its MPs took the decision to check out.
