Hold in-depth talks with Australia before signing trade deals: CII to govt

On Wednesday, CII signed an MoU with the New South Wales Business Chamber and opened its new branch in Sydney

The government should have in-depth negotiations with Australia before actually signing the Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Agreement in a bid to ensure India's interests and greater access to markets, trade body Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) has said.

CII Director General Chandrajit Banerjee, who is accompanying Finance Minister Arun Jaitley to Australia as part of the CII delegation, also said on Wednesday in Sydney that there was massive trade potential between the two countries which needs to be tapped.

Commenting on the ongoing talks on the free trade agreement (FTA) deal, Banerjee stressed that the government should have detailed talks before signing the deal which had already passed its set deadline of December last year.

"Trade talks have been on and it is important for us to really discuss these issues much more, before we pen down and sign down rather than signing an FTA and then lamenting that our interest areas were not taken into account," he said, adding," India's interest needs to be taken into account."

"We are a growing economy and an emerging economy. We have our own aspirations. We need to see that we also gain access to markets and its just not letting Indian markets for access which we are open to," Banerjee said.

"We need to see that FTA we henceforth sign is actually resulting in a situation where India and Indian industry can have a much stronger position," Banerjee said.

"There is huge potential between the two sides. But there is a huge trade deficit which means we are taking a lot from Australia rather than what we are able to send to Australia," he said.

On Wednesday, CII signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the New South Wales Business Chamber and opened its new branch in Sydney.

The branch would work in close partnership with the Australia-India Business Council and would work towards enhancing the trade relationship between the two sides.

"In terms of investments, there is a lot of potential for Australia to step up their investments in India," he said, adding, "Our purpose would be to see how we can gain market access into Australia. Its not a large market but there are certain niches we can look at."

He said that the opening up of the Sydney branch would also help in looking at attracting certain strategic investments from Australia into India, like agricultural processing or in the area of smart cities or logistics and manufacturing sectors.

"We are going to work in close partnership with Australia-India Business Council," Banerjee said.

Echoing similar sentiments, CEO of NIIT Technologies Arvind Thakur said, "Its is very important that India learns from the experience of other countries and their driving policies."

"Australia has already been successful in implementing GST (goods and services tax) and India is going to implement that," Thakur said, adding that the CII-NSW Business Chamber MoU can help Indian industry to learn from experiences of Australia, especially in the area of public private partnerships.