Indian Westerlies

Here is an article from policy section of economic times. It talks about the global race to control the strategic mines that produce Potash and Phosphate reserves in the world. These two macro nutrients (of the famous NPK trio) form an important part of the plant nutrients supplement in India. Of all the talks about using organic manure, the ground reality is that these supplements are the ones that are actually being used in a big way. For this, see here  for the general reasons. The subsidy component varies from 60 to 75% of total cost in India, which adds to the economic reason for high demand of fertilizers over organic manure. For fertilizer consumption in India, see here The imports of DAP and MOP (from which phosphate and potash are obtained, respectively) by India is one of the highest in the world. Close to 70% of the phosphate based fertilizers and 100% of potash-rich fertilizers sold in India are imported. So that makes these two imports vital for our food secu...

I was going through the Results Framework Document (What's  RFD ) for Ministry of Commerce here . In short, the RFD seeks to address three basic questions: (a) What are ministry’s/department’s main objectives for the year? (b) What actions are proposed by the department to achieve these objectives? (c) How would someone know at the end of the year the degree of progress made in implementing these actions? That is, what are the relevant success indicators and their targets which can be monitored? The primary objective as per the RFD for Commerce ministry is to "To provide policy support for increasing India’s annual export growth."  The item under action points for this goal reads, "Action-1: An export level of US$ 300 billion is targeted to be reached at the end of 2011-12". And "Action-2: Disposal of Appeals overdue under the Foreign Trade (Development & Regulation) Act, 1992." I will focus only on Action 1 as Action 2 i...

The original post below was posted before CBEC released the import duty calculator on their website. To that extent, the post below is now redundant. You may go here: Official Customs duty calculator In this blog I shall talk of various types of import duties/cess levied on products imported into India. I shall take an example and demonstrate the calculation method.  I assume one knows how to read HS codes. One  can find the HS code for products from DGFT website (under download section). Let's take the HS code  8474 80 10, which belongs to Brick making machine. The best way to find the correct duty is to catch hold of any Customs House Agent (CHA). Else, there are manual and books from which one can look up the values. On websites, the data for various components of import duties, are scattered and is difficult to collect for getting the whole picture. Anyway, for the duty calculations, the following steps are followed:  The duti...