CII to clue govt on FTA guidelines

The Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) is working on a set of industry recommendations for signing free trade agreements (FTAs).

The WTO and the Other Trade Agreements Committee of CII would finalise the list of recommendations soon and will submit it to the government, a CII release said.

The committee is of the view that the government should consider these recommendations as industry inputs for negotiating FTAs. The guidelines would include the issues of negative list, common floor tariff and rules of origin. India has been negotiating several FTAs for the last couple of years.

RV Kanoria, chairman of the committee, flagged the idea that a multilateral agreement for trade liberalisation under the WTO was more suitable for India, compared to bilateral trade and investment agreements.

Bilateral agreements having divergent standards with different countries might not help India remain competitive in the international market, said Kanoria.

While supporting liberalisation, CII has cautioned that unilateral liberalisation of tariff should be calibrated with internal reforms like labour reforms, agriculture reforms and infrastructure developments. Without such calibration, Indian industry would become uncompetitive in global and domestic markets, he said.

"What we want is not undue protection, but a level"�playing field," he said.

On the on-going negotiations at the WTO, Kanoria said CII was of the view that for the Doha round to succeed, member countries of the WTO need to focus on the development objective of the round.

The Doha round was launched for improving market access for developing countries and it must stick to that objective and not shift focus to look at increasing market access opportunities for developed countries, he said.

CII also feels that developing countries must be provided with all the flexibilities available to them during the agricultural and NAMA negotiations.