India, on Thursday, made it clear that it will insist on a sizeable negative list of items in the Free Trade Agreement with Asean and that there will be no compromise on the number of agricultural and textile items, in which duty free imports would be banned.
?e will not compromise on agriculture, textiles and products of interest to small scale industries. This is non-negotiable,?Union Minister of State for Commerce Jairam Ramesh told PTI in an interaction.
Indo-Asean FTA is coming into effect from January 1, 2007 and currently negotiations are on to work out a negative list of items after India insisted on a huge list of 852 items.
India had given a list of 1400 items, which was scaled down to 852 after Asean negotiators insisted on drastic pruning.
At the recent round of negotiations in Singapore last week, the talks got bogged down as Asean wanted the negative list to be cut to just about 60 items which India refused.
?ndia has already agreed to prune the negative list ?on which there would be no tariff cuts ?from 1,414 originally to 852 now,?he said, when asked about the Asean countries?demand to reduce the list to less than 100 items. The government has also offered the ten-nation bloc the option of Tariff Rate Quota on a few items such as palm oil, tea and coffee, he said.
TRQs allow countries to export a limited quantity of these commodities at a lower tariff compared to the normal applied rate in India.
However, the proposal has not found much favour with the grouping.
The FTA is proposed to come into effect from January 2007 and negotiations must be completed by the end of this month. But with the TNC failing to arrive at an agreement in the Singapore meeting, the deadline is unlikely to be met.
