NEW DELHI: Business needs to be more transparent with trade data to help stakeholders take the best decisions, Union commerce and industry minister Piyush Goyal said on Tuesday while launching a trade intelligence portal to help stakeholders in making informed decisions.
The Trade Intelligence & Analytics (TIA) portal will open up new insights for importers, exporters, startups, and micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs), he said, adding that smaller businesses, even in the remotest regions, will now have access to data that was previously available only to larger enterprises.
He also noted that the portal will help exporters better utilise the free trade agreements (FTAs). Describing the current world tariff situation as a wake-up call, he said the government and the private sector must pool resources at this critical moment to avoid regretting a lost opportunity.
Goyal invited stakeholders to bring their demands and assured them that the ministry would make every effort to address them.
If an issue concerns the department itself, it will be resolved quickly; if it concerns other departments, commerce will actively coordinate and work towards a solution, he said, urging stakeholders to be more demanding so that necessary improvements could be accelerated.
Goyal said the ministry of commerce and industry had put in significant effort to develop this platform. He said the portal has the potential to support trade diversification, expand India’s trade basket to newer areas and newer products, and help recognise lost opportunities.
Recognising the need for a robust intelligence and analytics framework to support evidence-based policymaking and enable targeted sectoral interventions, the department of commerce initiated the development of the TIA portal in March 2024. The department felt it necessary to expand these capabilities across all commodity and territorial divisions, export promotion councils (EPCs), and missions abroad in target countries.
The portal offers more than 270 interactive visualisations across over 28 dashboards. With the phasing out of legacy trade information dissemination portals such as the Department of Commerce Monitoring Dashboard, Niryat Portal and Tradestat Portal, the new and more exhaustive capabilities of the TIA portal significantly improve accessibility and usability of trade data in one place, the ministry said in a statement.
Database collation has been automated via APIs for convenient user access, and a seamless data extraction capability has been developed to download commodity and country data, it said. Automation has also been undertaken for workflows such as the Monthly Trade Report (more than 300 pages) and surge reports prepared in two versions based on trade alert data and final data (each more than 30 pages), it added.