New Delhi

Speaking at the Board of Trade meeting here, which included many industry association representatives, he expressed concern at the fall in export credit and said he had discussed the matter with the RBI and Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, as per an official statement. “I am very concerned that export credits have fallen. I can assure you, very soon, we will come out with the contours of a vibrant programme to particularly support MSMEs and will more importantly make foreign exchange export credit available at very competitive rates – like at sub-4 per cent rates for forex credit,” he said.

“All matters are on board. We will very soon come out with very robust guidelines. The RBI has been very supportive on this. The ECGC has come out with very practical solutions to empower banks to lend more to the exports sector. “The ECGC policy is also being revitalised and relooked at to make it more robust, to make it more comfortable for bankers to lend more,” he said. “We are waiting for the FM to take call on some of the issues that we have discussed. RBI was also spontaneous to support us Commerce Ministry in availability of export credit. Now, we will be coming out with the contours of the discussions that have been finalised between RBI, Finance and Commerce Ministries,” he added.

Minister switches Einstein for Newton

Goyal inadvertently erred in attributing the theory of gravity to Albert Einstein while asking the industry not to get into nitty gritty of calculations of growth which requires 12 pc rate to achieve the envisaged $5 trillion economy. In his address at the Board of Trade meeting, Goyal said: “Let’s work on the new spirit of enthusiasm, believing nothing is impossible. And together we can achieve that $1 trillion target in five years, don’t get into the calculations - that to have a $5 trillion economy, the country will have to grow at 12 per cent, today it is growing at 6-7 per cent - don’t get into those maths, those maths have never helped Einstein discover gravity .. if he had only gone by structured formulae, and what was past knowledge, I don’t think there would have been any innovation in this world.” Earlier the minister had stated the country must target $1 trillion exports in the next five years.

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