As India girds for its audacious tryst with a trillion dollar merchandise export colossus by 2030, a cornerstone of the Viksit Bharat@2047 prospectus, NITI Aayog’s Export Preparedness Index (EPI) 2024 emerges not as bureaucratic cartography, but as a scalpel dissecting subnational frailties and fulcrums. This fourth edition, unveiled on January 14, 2026, transcends antecedent iterations by enfolding macroeconomic stabilizers, cost arbitrages, human reservoirs, fiscal conduits, and MSME vivaria into its 70 indicator matrix, arrayed across four pillars: export infrastructure, trade ecosystem (40% weight), policy governance, and performance. In an epoch of geoeconomic fractiousness, where supply chain fealties shift like tectonic plates, this index mandates a paradigm of granular, district inflected export husbandry.
Pillars of Preparedness: A Diagnostic Mirror
EPIs architecture, 13 sub pillars spanning utilities, human capital, regulatory ether, and portfolio diversification, yields a taxonomy cleaving large states from smaller/northeastern/UT cohorts, tiered into frontrunners, contenders, and aspirants. Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, and Andhra Pradesh command the large state pantheon, their laurels rooted in logistical sinew and facilitative élan. Uttarakhand, Jammu & Kashmir, Nagaland, Dadra & Nagar Haveli Daman & Diu, and Goa illuminate the smaller fray, proving that littoral leverage and policy prescience can outpace sheer scale.
Yet, this laurel wreath conceals fissures: aspirant laggards, ensnared in infrastructural penury and institutional torpor, epitomize the peril of uneven federalism. CEO B.V.R. Subrahmanyam’s dictum, that exports are forged in state forges, resonates profoundly, as does Dr. Arvind Virmanis clarion for capacity husbandry, structural exorcism, and qualitative transmutation, echoing Prime Minister Narendra Modis imperative for product preeminence. Herein lies the rub: national export hubris falters sans subnational symbiosis.
Imperatives for a Cohesive Mercantile Surge
EPI 2024s salience inheres in its prescriptive acuity, spotlighting district clusters where value chains can burgeon, MSME ecologies fructify, and GVC tendrils entwine. Contenders must prioritize cost deflation, skilling cascades, and digital diaphaneity; aspirants, foundational bulwarks like port proximities and credit cascades. Federal compact demands as much: center state compacts to amplify state export policies, harmonize incentives, and midwife export incubi.
The stakes transcend ledgers. Robust export preparedness alone can midwife employment efflorescences, attenuate regional schisms, and inoculate against global vicissitudes, from Red Sea snarls to protectionist tempests. Yet, indices illumine; they do not enact. States, as Virmani avers, bear custodial imprimatur: to shun complacency, seize apertures, and architect ecosystems where parochial enterprise scales to planetary prowess.
In this tableau, EPI 2024 stands as federalisms export manifest, a summons to collective mercantile renaissance. India’s trillion dollar tryst beckons not as distant mirage, but proximate forge, provided subnational tinder’s ignite.
Author: This news is edited by: Abhishek Verma, (Editor, CANON TIMES)
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