I have come across the JIRA post that gives a solution as including exclusion tag in each dependency tag of POM.
But I have large number of projects and each project has huge number of dependency tags. It's not feasible to include this <exclusion> in each of the dependency tags.
Question: Is there a way to globally switch off the importing of transitive dependencies in maven?
Even though I'm not sure why would you want such a mechanism, and I don't recommend that, only exclude transitive dependencies that you actually don't want where the dependencies which depends on them can some how run without them.
The last point is very important those transitive dependencies are needed by your dependencies in order to work probably.
So despite all the above here you go, there is a plugin from Apache Maven called Apache Maven Enforcer Plugin, one of the built in rules it has is Ban Transitive Dependencies
