Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is likely to meet leading exporters this week to assess the slowdown in exports due to the global financial crisis.
"Till now, the meeting has not been finalised, but is likely this week," said a senior government official. Union Commerce Minister Kamal Nath and Finance Minister P Chidambaram will also attend the meeting.
The pace of exports in September is likely to slow significantly due to a host of factors, including lesser orders, high cost of export credit as well as Indian banks not accepting letter of credit of foreign banks, trade analysts said.
If this continues, India may miss its export target of $200 billion in the current fiscal, leading to a larger current account deficit and further pressure on the Indian rupee.
The slowdown in exports is taking place in spite of the rupee depreciating against the dollar by around 20 per cent since April this year.
A depreciating rupee is supposed to increase rupee earnings of Indian exporters, but the downsides have outweighed the trend.
"This is a vicious circle. When the rupee appreciated, we took lesser orders. But when it started to depreciate, we wanted to take more orders. But the financial crisis has changed things," said SP Agarwal, president