Thanks to a sharp drop in crude oil prices to $70 per barrel from a peak of $147 per barrel last year, country's imports fell by a drastic 32.4 per cent in August this year to $22.66 billion.
As a result, the country's trade gap narrowed to $8.37 billion against $15.78 billion in the same month in 2008, according to official data released on Thursday.
For the April-August period of the current fiscal, the overseas shipments dropped by 31 per cent to $64.12 billion from $92.95 billion in the same period last year.
However, the fall in August is brought down by nine percentage points from the negative 28.4 per cent in July.
Overseas shipments grew by 3.4 per cent to $168.7 billion in 2008-09 after being hit by the slowdown in the second half of the previous fiscal.
Exporters began bleeding from October last year, a month after the global economic situation worsened following the collapse of Lehman Brothers.