The Commerce Ministry's foreign trade arm DGFT has closed its regional offices at Amritsar, Goa and Puducherry with a view to optimally utilise its human and material resources, an official said.
These three offices of the Directorate General of Foreign Trade (DGFT) have been merged with its Ludhiana, Mumbai and Chennai offices.
"These offices have been merged as they do not have substantive workload to justify a full-fledged regional office," the official added.
However, extension counters have been opened at each of these three places for addressing any immediate issues relating to export and import under its jurisdiction.
The directorate, with headquarters at the national capital, is responsible for formulating and implementing the foreign trade policy with the objective of promoting the country's exports.
The DGFT also issues scrips/authorisation to exporters and monitors their corresponding obligations through a network of 38 regional offices and an extension counter at Indore.
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The regional offices are located in different cities, including at Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Bhopal, Chandigarh, Coimbatore, Cuttack, Dehradun, Guwahati, Hyderabad, Jaipur, Jammu, Kanpur, Kolkata, Moradabad, Nagpur, Panipat, Patna, Pune, Raipur, Rajkot, Shillong, Varanasi and Visakhapatnam.
All regional offices provide facilitation to exporters with regard to developments in international trade, that is WTO agreements, rules of origin (place from where the product originated) and anti-dumping issues.