India made it clear on Thursday that it will insist on a sizeable negative list of items in the Free Trade Agreement with ASEAN and there will be no compromise on the number of agricultural and textile items in which duty free imports would be banned.
"We will not compromise on agriculture, textiles and products of interest to small scale industries. This is non-negotiable," Minister of State for Commerce Jairam Ramesh told PTI in an interaction.
Indo-Asean FTA is coming into effect from January 1 and 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 1,400 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.
"India 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 offered the 10-nation bloc the option of tariff rate quota on a few items like 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.
ASEAN member countries like Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam have expressed concern over the negative list since some of these countries primarily export only one-two commodities to India. These countries argue that they stand to lose from the FTA if items like palm oil, tea, coffee and pepper are kept in the negative list.
"There were other differences as well... we wanted the FTA to include services and investments also, but they (ASEAN countries) wanted only goods," he said. "Ultimately, it (signing the FTA) is a political decision," he added.
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.
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