New Delhi: The ministry  of commerce has decided to restart the practice of releasing monthly exports and imports data only once in a month with in the light of providing a clear picture of the country's trade, an official said.

The ministry has been providing the data twice a month since October 2020: the preliminary data in the first week and the corrected numbers in the middle of the month. The choice is significant since the figures for September of this year show a clear difference between the preliminary and final export growth rate numbers.

The preliminary data, which was made public on October 3, shows that September's merchandise exports decreased by 3.5% to USD 32.62 billion. The final statistics, which was made public on October 14, however, revealed an increase of roughly 5% to USD 35.45 billion.

Also, there were some differences in the data for the export growth rate in earlier months. For instance, according to preliminary data made public on September 3, exports in August decreased by 1.15 percent to USD 33 billion. On September 14, it was changed to 1.62 percent at USD 33.92 billion.

Similar to this, the commerce ministry's early figures for exports in July showed a decline of 0.76 percent to USD 35.24 billion, which was then changed to a gain of 2.14 percent to USD 36.27 billion.