Policy Update
Siddhant Koul
Background
The Government has initiated the creation of Trade Connect ePlatform to connect Indian Exporters, MSMEs and Entrepreneurs with various stakeholders including Indian Missions Abroad, Export Promotion Councils, and other Partner Government Agencies. The platform will provide information on trade events taking place in different parts of the world, benefits available due to India’s Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) and other international trade related information and data (PIB,2024).
The Trade Connect e-Platform is a single window initiative that is fast, accessible and transformational as it will enable exporters to add newer markets. This was stated by Union Minister of Commerce and Industry, Shri Piyush Goyal during the launch of the Trade Connect e-Platform in New Delhi (PIB,2024).
Shri Goyal said that our focus should be to identify the opportunities in the world market. He also said that with the launch of this platform, India will be able to increase its market share in the world in exports, adding that international opportunities will be showcased on the platform. Small FPOs, businesses and entrepreneurs will also be able to access this platform, and learn of the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) benefits that are available to expand their trade, the Union Minister noted. The Trade connect 2.0 Platform is now a multilingual platform providing access and inclusivity to diverse users including 22 Official Languages of India and English.
The Union Minister during his address reiterated his $1 trillion merchandise and $1 trillion services export target for 2030 and hoped that with the help of this platform this target would be achieved. He added that the platform will help in creating partnerships and synergies as it can be connected with Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), Government e-Marketplace (GeM) portal for the suppliers to get access to wider markets and be more competitive.
The Trade Connect e-Platform (https://trade.gov.in), is a new digital initiative aimed at transforming the landscape of international trade for Indian exporters, especially MSMEs (Medium, Small and Medium Enterprises). The platform, developed in collaboration with key partners including the Ministry of MSME, EXIM Bank, Department of Financial Services (DFS), and the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), is set to address information asymmetry by offering exporters comprehensive support and resources. Trade Connect e-Platform provides comprehensive international trade information and services to all exporters, including MSMEs, enabling them easy access to global markets. It enables direct connections between global buyers and Indian exporters with the help of Indian missions abroad.
FUNCTIONING
The Trade Connect ePlatform serves as a digital platform for connecting entrepreneurs and Exporters with various stakeholders, including Export Promotion Centre, Indian Missions Abroad, and Director General of Foreign Trade offices. The Trade Connect e-Platform serves as a one-stop solution, providing exporters with near real-time access to critical trade-related information, while seamlessly connecting them to key government entities such as the Indian Missions abroad, Department of Commerce, Export Promotion Councils, and other trade experts. Whether a seasoned exporter or a new entrant, the platform is designed to assist businesses at every stage of their export journey.
Some of the key services available on the platform include:
(i) Trade Agreements and Tariff explorer – Aids in understanding benefits of FTAs and tariffs for Indian products
(ii) Product Guide and Country guide – Aids in understanding top markets, certification and compliance requirements, non tariff barriers, anti dumping duties and connect with buyers in various markets
(iii) Global e-Commerce Guide – Information on top countries, categories and e Commerce portals in the world
(iv) Trade Events Worldwide – Information on trade shows and events in India and abroad in a single place
(v) Ask an Expert – Subject matter stakeholders resolve trade queries of Indian businesses on international trade
(vi) EXIM Paathshaala – Learning content and videos on various aspects of international
(vii) Source from India – Recognized exporters can create micro-pages on the platform for discoverability by international buyers (Sansad, 2025).
DGFT launched the pilot phase of Bharat Aayat Niryat Lab Setu—a unified digital platform integrating accredited testing and inspection agencies nationwide to provide streamlined, paperless certification for export and import commodities. The platform enables exporters/importers to search, select, apply for, track and receive digitally signed test reports through a single online interface accessible via the Trade Connect ePlatform. Onboarding of laboratories begin on 4 November 2025, and applications for testing were activated from 15 November 2025. The pilot initially covers labs under the Tea Board, Coffee Board and Rubber Board, with phased onboarding of Commodity Boards, EPC-empanelled and private laboratories. The platform is meant to result in the following benefits:
i. Improved transparency and accountability through real-time visibility of lab operations.
ii. Reduced dwell time by streamlining testing and clearance procedures
iii. Enabled global data standardization to support regulatory compliance and interoperability
iv. Centralized access to lab services for Exporters.
v. Strengthened coordination within the cross-border trade ecosystem.
Performance
Currently, Trade Connect has over 20 lakh registered users with more than 35 lakh, certificates of origin issued (as on 5 June, 2026). This e-Platform shall connect more than 6 Lakh IEC holders, over 180 Indian Mission officials, over 600 Export Promotion Council Officials, besides the officials from DGFT, Department of Commerce, banks etc.
On the broader export side, India’s total exports for FY 2025-26 reached an estimated $860 billion, a modest rise over FY 2024-25, driven almost entirely by services (nearly 8 percent growth) while merchandise exports grew by under 1 percent (Economic Survey, 2026).Though the Platform cannot be attributed to the said growth
MSME-related exports were already rising before Trade Connect’s full rollout: their share in India’s total merchandise exports grew from 45.74 percent in 2023-24 to 48.55 percent in 2024-25, with MSME exports touching ₹9.52 lakh crore in just the first half of FY26 (Lok Sabha reply, Ministry of MSME, 2025). Though causal data isn’t available for assesment
Impact
The scale of the problem information access is meant to solve is itself striking. Despite contributing nearly half of India’s exports, fewer than 1 percent of India’s registered MSMEs actually export, with “lack of market information” and “lack of business contacts” repeatedly cited as the two most significant barriers to internationalisation (NITI Aayog, 2024; Dun & Bradstreet, 2021). A 2024 NITI Aayog report on boosting MSME exports explicitly recommended creating “a one-stop information channel for exporters” and a unified national trade portal to replace India’s existing fragmented, often outdated information sources — a gap Trade Connect is structurally positioned to close (NITI Aayog, 2024).
Where tariff concessions have been paired with simplified, digitally accessible procedures, the effect on specific sectors has been measurable rather than speculative. Under the India-UAE CEPA, gem and jewellery exports to the UAE rose from $4.95 billion in FY2022 to $8.04 billion in FY2024 — a jump of over 60 percent — with plain gold jewellery exports alone surging 127.6 percent after the agreement cut the UAE’s gold duty to a preferential 1 percent under a Tariff Rate Quota mechanism (GJEPC, 2024).
It is worth being precise about what this example does and does not show: this growth occurred through CEPA’s own implementation process, which predates Trade Connect, and is not a direct outcome of the platform’s Tariff Explorer. It is cited here only to illustrate what tariff-benefit awareness can achieve when exporters are able to identify and act on a concession — the kind of outcome the Tariff Explorer is designed to help more exporters discover, not a measured result of the platform itself.
Read together, these two threads define what the platform can plausibly deliver: if information access alone moved even a modest share of India’s non-exporting MSMEs toward export-readiness, or helped more eligible exporters claim FTA concessions at the rate the UAE case demonstrates is possible, the output would be measurable in trade data within a few years. This also reframes what “impact” should mean for Trade Connect — not awareness or registration numbers, but a rising share of eligible exporters actually converting information into claimed benefits.
This anticipated impact needs to be weighed against the scale of the target it is meant to serve. To reach the $1 trillion export goal for 2026-27, merchandise exports alone must grow 16-17 percent to $530 billion, a target resting on manufacturing competitiveness and global demand conditions that a digital information platform cannot directly influence (Economic Survey, 2026). Equally, any future claim that Trade Connect “drove” MSME export growth will need to isolate the platform’s marginal contribution from the pre-existing upward trend already noted above, rather than crediting it with gains already underway through schemes like the Export Promotion Mission and Niryat Protsahan.
Emerging Issues
The tariff explorer service on the Trade Connect ePlatform provides information on tariff concessions available to eligible exports from the country. Furthermore, the Export Promotion Mission (EPM) establishes a comprehensive, flexible, and digitally driven framework for enhancing export initiatives. This approach signifies a strategic transition from numerous fragmented schemes to a unified, outcome-oriented mechanism capable of promptly responding to global trade challenges and the evolving needs of exporters. Therefore, Trade Connect can definitely help with information but it does not guarantee export growth.
This gap is best illustrated by India’s own record with FTAs. Even though the Tariff Explorer is meant to resolve information asymmetry around FTA benefits, GTRI (Global Trade Research Initiative) finds that only 20-30 percent of India’s eligible exports actually utilise FTA preferences, compared with 60-70 percent utilisation by exporters shipping into India under the same agreements.
GTRI attributes this gap primarily to high compliance costs and already-low tariffs in partner countries rather than to exporter unawareness, and has called for a dedicated FTA Impact Monitoring Authority to track utilisation (KNN India, 2026; ETV Bharat, 2026). The Tariff Explorer addresses the awareness component of this gap; it does not reduce the cost of proving rules-of-origin compliance or the certification burden that keeps smaller exporters from claiming benefits even when they know these exist. A policy update should therefore treat the Tariff Explorer as necessary but insufficient: it closes the information gap while the implementation gap persists.
Mature single-window trade systems South Korea’s dual UNIPASS/uTradeHub model, and equivalents in Singapore, Japan and Hong Kong have been built over two to three decades and integrate customs clearance, trade finance, and banking directly into the window, not merely information and contact points (ECLAC, 2024). Korea’s system is particularly noted for functionalities that internationalise MSMEs by plugging them into e-commerce and trade-finance workflows. Judged against this benchmark, Trade Connect at under two years old sits closer to an information-intermediation layer than a transactional single window, a reasonable first stage, but one that should be read as early rather than complete.
Way Forward
DGFT should link Tariff Explorer output directly to certification pathways via Bharat Aayat Niryat Lab Setu, so an exporter identifying an FTA benefit can move straight into compliance rather than hitting a second, disconnected process. The Commerce Department should track and publish FTA utilisation rates disaggregated by scheme and firm size, rather than registered-user counts, as the primary success metric for Trade Connect’s Tariff Explorer. Over the medium term, MSME-focused compliance subsidies covering rules-of-origin documentation and certification costs would do more to close the 20-30 percent utilisation gap than additional information features alone.
Trade Connect represents a genuine step toward reducing information asymmetry in India’s export ecosystem, and its multilingual, single-window design is a meaningful improvement over the fragmented DGFT and Invest India portals it replaces. But its success should be judged against two precise indicators: whether India’s FTA utilisation rate moves meaningfully above its historical 20-30 percent band, and whether MSME export growth accelerates beyond its pre-platform trendline. Absent movement on these two indicators, the platform’s contribution will remain difficult to distinguish from momentum that already existed.
Sources
(2024) NITI Aayog. Boosting Exports from MSMEs. https://niti.gov.in/sites/default/files/2024-03/Boosting%20Exports%20from%20MSMEs_March%2020244_0.pdf
(2021, March) Dun & Bradstreet India. DNB Pulse, Edition 22. https://www.dnb.co.in/FILE/PULSE/2021/Mar/15/DNB-Pulse-Mar-Edition-22.pdf
(2024) Gem & Jewellery Export Promotion Council (GJEPC). CEPA Turns 3: Powers the India-UAE Trade Surge. https://gjepc.org/solitaire/?p=30067
(2026, Aug) PIB. Trade Connect ePlatform being setup to connect Indian Exporters, MSMEs and Entrepreneurs, Indian Missions Abroad, Export Promotion Councils and other Partner Government Agencies. https://www.pib.gov.in/Pressreleaseshare.aspx?PRID=2042117®=48&lang=2
(2024, Sept) PIB. Trade Connect e-Platform for exports is single window, fast, accessible and transformational: Shri Piyush Goyal. https://www.pib.gov.in/Pressreleaseshare.aspx?PRID=2053748®=48&lang=2
(2025, March 11) Sansad. Lok Sabha Unstarred Question 2026, Answered by MoS of Ministry of Commerce and Industry. https://sansad.in/getFile/loksabhaquestions/annex/184/AU2026_hGIhrW.pdf?source=pqals
(2025, Dec 10) PIB. 2025 Year End Review for Department of Commerce. https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2201284®=3&lang=1
(2026, Aug 7) PIB. DGFT Connects DPIIT-Recognised Startups to Global Trade Ecosystem via ‘Source from India’ Feature. https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2296253&lang=1®=3
(2026, June 7) PIB. Ease of Doing Business: Strengthening India’s Business Framework. https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2269961&lang=1®=1&
(2026, Jan 29) Ministry of Finance. External Sector, Economic Survey of India 2025-26. https://www.indiabudget.gov.in/economicsurvey/doc/eschapter/echap04.pdf
(2026, June 9) KNN India. India’s FTA Utilisation At 20–30% Amid Compliance Costs & Tariff Distortions: GTRI. https://knnindia.co.in/news/newsdetails/sectors/indias-fta-utilisation-at-2030-amid-compliance-costs-tariff-distortions-gtri
(2026, June 9) ETV Bharat. FTA Utilisation Low In India; Compliance Cost Is A Hurdle: GTRI. https://www.etvbharat.com/en/business/fta-utilisation-low-in-india-compliance-cost-is-a-hurdle-gtri-enn26060901965
About the Author
Siddhant Koul is a Research and Editorial Intern at IMPRI. He is a second-year B.A. (Hons.) Political Science student at Ramjas College, University of Delhi. An avid reader and close follower of global affairs and public intellectuals like Pratap Bhanu Mehta, he researches India’s energy security and geopolitical risk — having published a data-driven two-part series on India’s energy crisis drawing on Parliamentary records, PPAC data, and IEA market reports..
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the IMPRI Impact and Policy Research Institute for providing the platform to research and write this policy update article. Special thanks to the editorial board, mentors, and coordinators for their valuable feedback and constructive guidance throughout the drafting process
Reviewed by: Amrutha Kolluru, Gargi Bisht
Disclaimer:
All views expressed in this article belong solely to the author and do not necessarily reflect the official positions or policies of any affiliated organizations
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