Invisible, not incomprehensible With the war cry for the need to boost manufacturing reaching feverish pitch, facts and logic seem to have been thrown out of the window. Should we allow the frenzy around manufacturing to veil the services sector, which is the biggest component of our GDP; the sector, in which we are the sixth-largest exporter in the world; the sector, in which we have one of the highest surpluses in the world; and the sector, where continuous neglect has ensured export growth rate dipping below that of even manufacturing?

Shakti Shankar Patra | @TheDollarBiz

The apathy that our government has towards the services sector is, simply put, shocking. Firstly, it’s difficult to even get data related to export-import of services. While the Ministry of Commerce doesn’t publish it in the lucid manner that it publishes merchandise trade data, Services Export Promotion Council provides just exports data. The only authentic source for India’s services trade data is the RBI, which shows it as a sub-group under ‘invisibles’, the other components of which are transfers (repatriation) and income. Surely, over $150 billion worth of exports in FY2014, which created a services trade surplus of $72.96 billion, deserves a bit more respect! Can we even imagine, what our current account deficit would have been if instead of a huge surplus, we were also running a deficit in services trade? What’s ironic though is that this surplus has come despite the government not providing any incentive to India’s services exporters, at least nothing as compared to those offered to merchandise exporters.