Export Promotion Mission: Objectives, Outlay & Benefits

The Export Promotion Mission (EPM), in Hindi निर्यात संवर्धन मिशन, is a Government of India flagship framework to make Indian exports more competitive. It is unified, outcome-driven and digitally enabled, and it pulls several older export supports under one roof. In brief:

• What it is: a six-year national export framework, announced in the Union Budget 2025-26 and cleared by the Union Cabinet in November 2025.
• Outlay: a total of ₹25,060 crore across FY2025-26 to FY2030-31, per the Cabinet approval reported by PIB.
• Two sub-schemes: Niryat Protsahan (₹10,400 crore, the financial and trade-finance leg) and Niryat Disha (₹14,660 crore, the non-financial market-access leg).
• Who it targets: MSMEs, first-time exporters, labour-intensive sectors and low-export-intensity districts.

If you are new to India’s export support landscape, start with this overview of export incentives and then come back here for the scheme detail. This guide is educational, not financial or tax advice, so confirm your eligibility with a chartered accountant.

The objectives of the Export Promotion Mission centre on helping smaller and newer exporters win, finance and de-risk overseas orders. The scheme is built to address the practical barriers that stop MSMEs and first-time exporters from scaling.

Its stated objectives, as of 2026, include:

• Easier trade finance: cheaper and more accessible export credit, interest support, factoring and credit guarantees.
• Wider market access: help with branding, quality, technical and sustainability-standard compliance, certification, overseas warehousing, logistics and entry into new markets.
• Deeper MSME participation: bringing first-time and small exporters, and under-represented districts, into global trade.
• Consolidation: folding scattered, overlapping supports into a single, simpler framework.

A recurring practitioner question is whether EPM replaces schemes like RoDTEP or adds to them. It mostly consolidates enablers such as interest support rather than scrapping duty-remission schemes. The RoDTEP scheme continues to operate on its own track.

The headline figure is a ₹25,060 crore outlay spread over six financial years. Press coverage sometimes reports a larger "₹45,060 crore" number, which conflates the mission outlay with a separate Credit Guarantee facility. The clean breakdown below separates the two.

So the ₹25,060 crore is the mission budget, and the Credit Guarantee Scheme for Exporters (up to ₹20,000 crore) sits alongside it. Reporting that adds them to ₹45,060 crore is mixing two distinct pools.

Under the guarantee facility, the National Credit Guarantee Trustee Company (NCGTC) provides up to 100% credit-guarantee cover to lending institutions.

That lets them extend collateral-free export credit and additional working capital of up to 20% of an exporter’s sanctioned limit, per the Cabinet approval reported by PIB.

It runs through participating lenders, so it helps to know which export finance companies serve exporters in the first place.

Niryat Protsahan and Niryat Disha are the two sub-schemes that make up the Export Promotion Mission. The simplest way to keep them straight: Protsahan is about money, Disha is about markets.

What Niryat Protsahan actually funds

Interest subvention on pre- and post-shipment rupee export credit, export factoring and deep-tier financing, credit cards for e-commerce exporters, collateral support for export credit, and credit enhancement for entering new or high-risk markets.

What Niryat Disha actually funds

Export quality, testing and certification support, international branding and packaging help, participation in trade fairs and buyer-seller meets, overseas warehousing and logistics, inland transport reimbursement for remote districts, and capacity building at cluster, association and district level.

Together they cover the two things most small exporters struggle with: affordable financing and a way to reach buyers abroad. If market access is your gap, the practical first step is knowing how to find international buyers before you tap the branding support.

Say an MSME exporter draws ₹1 crore of pre-shipment export credit at 9% for 90 days. Niryat Protsahan’s interest subvention scheme, launched in January 2026, gives a base rate of 2.75% per annum on eligible rupee export credit.

The saving works out to roughly ₹1,00,00,000 × 2.75% × (90 ÷ 365) = about ₹68,000 on that one drawdown.

This figure is illustrative only. The base subvention is 2.75% per annum, capped at ₹50 lakh per exporter per financial year, with the exact rate, tenure and eligible categories set by the DGFT and RBI notifications, so check the current notification or ask your bank.

The subvention only helps if the underlying order actually pays, so plan the timeline for realisation and repatriation of export proceeds alongside the credit drawdown.

The Export Promotion Mission consolidates two long-running export supports in particular: the Interest Equalisation Scheme (IES), which delivered interest subvention on pre- and post-shipment export credit, and the Market Access Initiative (MAI), which funded branding, trade-fair participation and market development.

Rather than run each as a standalone programme with repeated short extensions, IES-style interest support now sits inside Niryat Protsahan and MAI-style market access sits inside Niryat Disha, per the PIB framework note.

Here is how the change looks for a practitioner:

Duty-remission schemes such as RoDTEP and capital-goods schemes such as EPCG benefits are separate tracks and continue on their own rules.

Eligibility centres on registered exporters, with a deliberate tilt toward MSMEs and first-time exporters. As of 2026, you will typically need the standard export prerequisites in place.

A quick eligibility checklist:

• A valid Importer Exporter Code (IEC) from DGFT.
• GST registration where applicable, and a valid PAN.
• Udyam / MSME registration if you are claiming MSME-specific benefits.
• A Registration-cum-Membership Certificate (RCMC) from the relevant export promotion council.
• For finance benefits, an export-credit relationship with a bank.

Priority is given to labour-intensive sectors, first-time exporters and low-export-intensity districts, so smaller players are explicitly in scope rather than an afterthought. If you export services, note that your export of services under GST status also shapes which benefits and refunds you can eventually claim.

"Which portal do I actually use?" is the most common exporter question, and the honest answer is that it depends on the benefit. Finance benefits flow through your bank under RBI guidelines; market-access and registration steps run through DGFT and Trade Connect (trade.gov.in).

A practical sequence:

Step 1: Get your basics right

Get your basics right: IEC, GST/PAN, Udyam registration and RCMC.

Step 2: Apply through your export-credit bank

For interest support and credit guarantee, apply through your export-credit bank, which claims the subvention under the RBI notification.

Step 3: Register for market access and branding support

For market access and branding, register and explore support on DGFT and the Trade Connect ePlatform (trade.gov.in).

Step 4: Keep proceeds evidence ready

Many compliance-linked benefits and your GST zero-rating depend on you actually realising and evidencing export proceeds. A quick FIRC calculator helps you sanity-check the rupee value your bank should credit against each remittance.

Because rules and portals are still being detailed by DGFT sector by sector, verify the live process on dgft.gov.in and confirm treatment with a chartered accountant before you claim.

Most coverage of EPM is written for goods and manufacturing MSMEs, with interest support framed around pre/post-shipment rupee export credit. Services and ITeS exporters are asking a fair question: does any of this reach us?

The mission’s market-access and compliance support can apply to services exporters, and services exporters register with the Services Export Promotion Council (SEPC) for their RCMC.

Finance benefits, though, have historically been goods-centric, so read each sub-notification carefully rather than assuming parity. If you export software or IT services, how you handle international payments for IT ITeS and keep forex-receipt evidence still drives your GST zero-rating.

Dating the scheme matters, because a static page decays fast on a fresh government programme. Here is the status as of July 2026.

• Union Budget 2025-26: the Export Promotion Mission announced.
• November 2025: the Union Cabinet cleared the ₹25,060 crore total outlay, per PIB.
• January 2026: the interest subvention scheme under Niryat Protsahan launched via DGFT trade notice, at a 2.75% base rate per annum capped at ₹50 lakh per exporter per year.
• February 2026: PIB published its integrated-framework explainer detailing the two sub-schemes and the up-to-₹20,000 crore Credit Guarantee Scheme for Exporters.
• Ongoing: DGFT continues to publish sector-wise operational detail on dgft.gov.in.

For authoritative detail, PIB press releases, the DGFT EPM page and IBEF’s overview are the primary sources.

EPM helps you win, finance and de-risk exports. But nearly every compliance-linked benefit, your GST zero-rating and your export-obligation and realisation requirements still hinge on one unglamorous step: actually receiving your money from abroad and evidencing it.

That is where a clean proceeds workflow earns its keep. Xflow is not part of the government scheme; it is a Reserve Bank of India (RBI) authorised Payment Aggregator - Cross Border (PA-CB) platform, holding final PA-CB authorisation for both exports and imports as of February 2026, that helps Indian exporters receive international payments.

Its receiving accounts settle to your Indian bank account the next business day (T+1) at the live mid-market rate (MMR).

Crucially for the paperwork, Xflow auto-issues an electronic Foreign Inward Remittance Advice, or eFIRA, as the forex-receipt evidence that closes the loop for EDPMS, eBRC and GST-refund purposes.

Getting proceeds in cleanly and on time is what turns an EPM benefit on paper into one you can actually claim.