In the face of slow global demand for merchandise, India's exports in the current financial year are likely to stay flat or may even move backward of USD 310 billion, the figure achieved in 2014-15, according to an assessment made by ASSOCHAM.

While it has been a weak trend since July 2014, exports have been witnessing contractions since January this year right through April. "In fact, generally the last quarter of the fiscal turns out to be much better to make up for the previous quarters. However, it has been a different situation in the last quarter of fiscal 2014-15 and the first month of 2015-16," the ASSOCHAM paper said.

Engineering products, gems and jewellery and petroleum products are the biggest contributors to the overall export basket in terms of value. In the previous fiscal, while engineering goods registered a modest increase, the other two segments have been witnessing sharp drop.

The trend is likely to continue at least for gems and jewellery, while the situation may somewhat stabilize for the petroleum segment since after seeing a sharp fall, the crude oil prices have stopped seeing much of drop. Petroleum exports are related to the prices of crude oil.

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