Goyal opens trade command centre, orders faster clearance of SCOMET export licences

Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal on Thursday launched a National Strategic Trade Command Centre at Vanijya Bhawan in New Delhi, and used the occasion to push officials to clear a backlog of export licence applications for sensitive goods.

The centre, built by the Department of Commerce, pulls data from the Directorate General of Foreign Trade’s systems onto a single set of dashboards. It is meant to give senior officials a running view of India’s trade performance, the use of export promotion schemes, regulatory approvals and how long applications take to process.

Commerce Secretary Rajesh Agrawal and Director General of Foreign Trade Lav Agarwal were present at the launch.

The SCOMET backlog

While going through the dashboard for SCOMET, the list of Special Chemicals, Organisms, Materials, Equipment and Technologies that need a licence before they can be exported, Goyal called for the Inter-Ministerial Committee that handles these applications to meet regularly, weekly if needed, so that pending cases are cleared quickly, the ministry said.

Goyal praised the centre for making trade decisions data-driven and based on evidence, the ministry said. It did not say how many SCOMET applications are pending.

What the dashboards show

In its first phase, the centre covers the main DGFT functions: the Importer Exporter Code, the Advance Authorisation and Export Promotion Capital Goods schemes, certificates of origin, SCOMET, and restricted imports and exports.

Officials will be able to look at the data at several levels: the national picture, individual regional offices, schemes, products, destination markets, and down to single applications, depending on their access rights. The dashboards track scheme use, processing times, pendency, export obligations and compliance.

The ministry said the centre is meant to help with three jobs: spotting trends and bottlenecks early, benchmarking regional offices and schemes against performance targets, and finding recurring problems that call for simpler rules.

It is also meant to sharpen trade intelligence, with analysis by product and market, tracking of how well India uses its trade agreements, and searching for new export openings.

What comes next

The centre runs on existing DGFT systems and the Trade Connect ePlatform. The ministry plans to add data from other departments and agencies over time, along with automated alerts and more advanced analytics.

Access is to widen in phases to other ministries, states and export promotion councils, with the aim of turning the centre into a decision-support system for the whole government. The ministry said the change would let the department and DGFT move “from periodic reporting towards continuous monitoring”.

The launch came on the same day the ministry put India’s combined goods and services exports for April to September 2026-27 at an estimated $476.20 billion, up from $418.31 billion a year earlier.