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India Inc upbeat on impact of Indo-Pak trade talks

Indian industry is 'upbeat' about the Indo-Pak summit in July, saying it will improve the atmosphere for bilateral trade, which has the potential to touch $5 billion.

"We are very upbeat on the meeting and are hoping that some of the groundwork for making trade easy will be done," officials of FICCI, a leading industry chamber, said in New Delhi.

Officials said that the meeting was expected to help reduce the unofficial level of trade, currently around $1 billion, and substantially increase the official level of trade now at around $20 million.

"Bilateral trade has the potential to touch five times the level of unofficial trade provided both sides are able to address the bottlenecks in trade infrastructure," they said.

While expressing hopes that the status of most favoured nation would be granted to India, the officials said that the industry hoped that both sides would work to put in place an 'investment promotion and protection treaty' to enable industry tie-ups and facilitate investments.

India granted MFN status to Pakistan as early as in 1995, but Islamabad is yet to reciprocate, which is mandatory under the WTO regime.

Other issues include expanding the list of permissible items which are allowed to be imported from India. At present Pakistan allows import of 606 items.

Both governments are also expected to work together to discuss the possibility of a land route for seamless transshipment of goods' from bonded warehouses on both sides of the border as the shipping route is almost 6-7 times more costly than the land route, they said.

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