EEPC India urges Centre for restoration of MEIS benefits

The Engineering Export Promotion Council of India (EEPC) has urged the Centre for restoration of benefits under the Merchandise Export from India Scheme (MEIS).

An EEPC statement said that the scheme has been stopped by the Revenue Department.

Accordingly, the exporters body approached the Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal seeking his intervention for restoration of the benefits.

"Exporters do factor in external volatility and can often sense such changes. What is difficult for them to factor in is sudden internal policy changes and especially those which have retrospective effect," EEPC India Chairman Mahesh K Desai stated in his letter to the Commerce and Industry Minister.

"Exporters have priced in their MEIS benefit after the government announced that MEIS benefit will be extended till December 31, 2020."

According to Desai, sudden stoppage of benefits will have an extremely adverse impact on exporters' ability to "survive in these difficult conditions".

Besides, he pointed out that engineering exporters work on long term contracts and "such retrospective changes" have a debilitating impact particularly on MSME exporters.

Furthermore, he said: "MEIS scheme has played an invaluable part in not only maintaining our exports globally but also in diversifying our exports market. Furthermore, the MEIS scheme has neutralized some of the taxes and para taxes embedded in the production of exported goods and hence it is in some sense a legitimate quasi refund of taxes".

He said the MEIS should not be stopped without replacing it with the alternative scheme of 'RODTEP'.

In addition, he said that MEIS benefit has significantly helped Indian engineering exporters maintain their competitiveness. This is more so, since over 90 per cent of the engineering exports are either low or medium value added products..