In its continued efforts to ease the pain of the global slowdown on the heavily bleeding Indian export sector, the government will tomorrow consider a proposal to make available a total corpus of Rs 5,000 crore to exporters on account of insurance cover.

In its meeting tomorrow, the Union Cabinet will take up the proposal to expand the scope and utilisation of the National Export Insurance Account by increasing its Budget allocation from Rs 2,000 crore to Rs 5,000 crore, a senior government official told The Indian Express.

Apart from raising the quantum of funds, the proposal also includes a variety of measures to make insurance easily available to exporters across the spectrum. “The aim is enable the exporter to get all kind of support that he needs in such uncertain times. This includes, for example, providing insurance under a single-buyer policy, which wasn’t there till now,” the official said.

The National Export Insurance Account was operationalised last year to provide export credit risk cover to exporters and other large value export transactions that may not otherwise get cover. It is maintained and operated by a public trust by the Export Credit Guarantee Corporation of India and the commerce ministry.

With the sharp downturn in demand in developed markets like the US and western Europe, which also comprise more than half India's export market, the Indian export sector has taken a bad hit in terms of business volume as well as job losses.

While the government had issued a Rs 2,000-crore stimulus package exclusively for the export sector about 10 days ago, talks are on to issue more of such packages for specific export-oriented sectors like engineering, chemicals, etc., which will likely be unveiled some time early next week.