Bangladesh’s export to India has stagnated as the country is failing to reap the benefit of duty-free market access due to lack of government effort and coordination, said economists in a dialogue on Tuesday. They said non-tariff barriers like certification and accreditation and cumbersome procedure and documentation put by India and local infrastructure crisis, inadequate custom and port facility had long been persisting because of lack of government effort.
‘I believe there is big problems of willingness and coordination of the government as we know and have been talking about these problems for long but still there is no solution,’ said Centre for Policy Dialogue distinguished fellow Debapriya Bhattacharya.
The CPD organised the dialogue on ‘Taking Advantage of Indian Market Access Initiative Through Promotion of Trade Facilitation’ at a city hotel.
Debapriya also questioned why the government was spending India’s $1-billion loan mostly to purchase vehicles from India.
‘We have these long standing problems of infrastructure and non-tariff barriers and the government is not spending the money on that,’ he said.
CPD chairman Rehman Sobhan said the government lacked effort to explore the Indian market for Bangladeshi businessmen.
‘I will give the government a B-mark for their effort on this. For the businessmen this will be even lower,’ he said.
Debapriya said the export to India showed progress immediately after the duty-free access in 2011 but now witnessing stagnancy.
‘We need to check whether that periodic boost was because of duty-free access or there was any other reason behind that,’ he said.
CPD executive director Mustafizur Rahman, in his keynote presentation, said that although export to India increased but the Bangladeshi market share decreased in recent years.
‘Bangladesh’s export to India was 0.16 per cent of India’s global export in 2000 which came down to 0.13 per cent in 2013,’ he said.
‘On the other hand, India’s share to Bangladeshi import was 9.91 per cent in 2000 which increased to 16.31 per cent in 2013.’
Mustafiz said the non-tariff barrier in India was also very high despite the duty-free access.
‘Even some of the certification or testing requirement in India is not seen when we export to the USA or to the European Union,’ he said.
‘If we talk about cement then we can see that it takes about 2-3 years to receive the initial permission to Indian market,’ Mustafiz said.
Although India has accredited 25 export items, the Indian custom officials are not accepting the certification of the Bangladesh Standard and Testing Institute of those commodities, he said.
Former commerce secretary Sohel Ahmed said Bangladesh had started developing the land ports earlier than India.
‘Even now, the businessmen of North East India cannot open LC for importing from Bangladesh unless they come to Kolkata,’ he said.
India-Bangladesh Chamber of Commerce and Industry president Abdul Matlub Ahmad said Bangladesh lacked exportable items to the Indian market.
‘And when we try to bring the Indian investment the government could not provide electricity, gas and land for setting up the industry,’ he said.
Former Federation of Bangladesh Chambers of Commerce and Industry president Abdul Awal Mintoo said Bangladesh should also explore the Indian market for tourism and education beside the regular products.
‘We have problems at our end which we need to resolve and also India need to enhance its cooperation,’ he said.
State-minister for foreign affairs Shahriar Alam said that the government was working very hard to resolve the problems mentioned in the dialogue.
‘We will be opening deputy high commission-level office in Gauhati and some other destination. We also signed an agreement use 200 meters of the Indian border to reduce the congestion in our land ports,’ he said.
-With New Age input
