National Strategic Trade Command Centre Opens at Vanijya Bhawan

India's foreign trade administration got a digital control room on 15 October 2026, when the Union Minister of Commerce and Industry, Piyush Goyal, switched on the National Strategic Trade Command Centre (NSTCC) at Vanijya Bhawan in New Delhi. Commerce Secretary Rajesh Agrawal and the Director General of Foreign Trade, Lav Agarwal, were present.

Why the centre was set up

The Department of Commerce has built the NSTCC so that the officers who frame trade policy no longer have to wait for periodic reports to learn how exports and imports are moving. Records lying in several separate trade systems are pulled together and turned into dashboards that can be read at a glance. A senior officer can see how an export promotion scheme is performing, how many files are pending, how long an approval is taking and where the pipeline is choking.

Depending on the access a user's role permits, the same screen can be opened out from the national picture down to one Regional Authority, one scheme, one product, one destination market or even a single application.

What the first phase covers

• Importer Exporter Code (IEC)
• Advance Authorisation and Export Promotion Capital Goods (EPCG)
• Certificate of Origin (CoO)
• SCOMET, which stands for Special Chemicals, Organisms, Materials, Equipment and Technologies
• Restricted imports and exports, with other regulatory and facilitation work

The three pillars

Three purposes shape the design. Integrated monitoring gives one consolidated view of trade trends, pendency and emerging risks. Performance assessment lets schemes, processes and Regional Authorities be measured against set indicators. The third is policy input drawn from evidence, so that recurring bottlenecks and procedural tangles are spotted and simplified.

The Minister's instruction on SCOMET

Looking through the SCOMET dashboard, the Minister asked the Inter-Ministerial Committee to meet far more often, weekly if that is what it takes, so that the heap of waiting applications is cleared without delay.

The centre has been built on plumbing that already exists, including the systems of the DGFT and the Trade Connect ePlatform, and datasets from other departments will be folded in by stages. Later it is to be opened to other ministries, state governments, Export Promotion Councils and similar bodies, with automated alerts and sharper analytics added as it grows.