India in the WTO

The sixth round of India-EU FTA negotiations in New Delhi has Indian NGOs demanding access to “secret” FTA negotiating texts. The Times of India reports that protestors were detained outside the office of the European Commission in New Delhi. A body called the Forum on FTAs (described elsewhere as an umbrella group of 75 organizations) is spearheading these Indian civil society protests. An entity called FTA Watch-India has sprung up recently.

While I cannot comment specifically on the demands of this group in the EU-India FTA context, a discussion on how India makes its trade policy and whether it adequately consults with domestic stakeholders in formulating negotiating positions is much needed. Domestic stakeholders who ought to be consulted include not only NGOs, but also parliament, business, labor unions, farmers groups and consumers. Not much literature is available on the Indian trade policy-making process. There is however an interesting paper by Biswajit Dhar on this in a publication by IISD available here.  See Biswajit Dhar and Murali Kallummal, “Trade policy off the hook: The making of Indian trade policy since the Uruguay Round”, in Halle and Wolfe (eds.) Process Matters: Sustainable Development and Domestic Trade Transparency, IISD 2007.

I had earlier posted on a news report on the low appetite in India these days for new FTA commitments given imminent elections and the domestic impact of the global economic downturn. An Economic Times story shows that the concerns about the EU-India negotiations are not limited to civil society, but also emanate from business and agricultural economic interests.

Speaking to ET last week, a commerce ministry official sought to allay the growing concerns in domestic circles over the proposed India-EU economic agreement. “There are strong complementarities between the EU and India. After all, we have not yet reached the stage of making the trade-offs and so the fears being expressed now are unfounded,” said the official, who was busy preparing for the sixth round of India-EU bilateral talks beginning Tuesday.
This, however, could be an over-simplistic view. There is clearly a need for greater involvement of all stakeholders in the negotiation process. The high-level trade group which had drawn the broad contours of the agreement was not representative enough.
The EU is India’s largest trading partner, accounting for a fifth of India’s total trade and also one of the largest sources of foreign investment in India. As opposed to this, India currently accounts for less than 2% of the EU’s total trade.
Clearly, as things stand now, India has much to lose (or gain) from the agreement as compared to the EU. Note that the agreement would cover a gamut of areas—trade in goods and services, IPRs, cross-border investments, competition policy, government procurement etc. So India’s policymakers ought to be more chary of the proposed pact than their European counterparts. There is a need for more transparency as well as greater involvement of all stakeholders in the negotiations.
Going by the high-level group’s report, India might need to go WTO-plus in the area of trade in goods, with no commensurate reciprocal gestures from the EU side. The agreement would, as things stand now, allow India to keep just 10% of the tariff lines—which include both agricultural and industrial goods—outside its scope.
It may be noted that India has been resisting the multilateral (WTO) trade liberalisation deal even as it did not have to cut tariffs on 5%f agricultural tariff lines and only make less-than-average reductions in another 7%, and looked close to getting the freedom to keep 5% of industrial tariff lines outside tariff reduction formula. Besides, India has already got preferential (zero) access to EU in case of several tariff lines under the GSP system, which reduces the scope for India to gain in terms of reduction in tariff barriers by the EU.