Friday, October 14 2005 17:21 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

New Delhi: India's 'issue paper' on services has been accepted as the basis for ongoing negotiations at WTO, giving a shot in the arm to New Delhi's efforts to speed up multilateral talks on opening up the sector.

The issue paper, stressing on improving quality and coverage of commitments in the sector, was presented by Commerce Minister Kamal Nath at the Core group on services at Geneva, co-chaired by India and US.

The core group on services, having 15 countries as its members, met in Geneva on October 12 to consider concrete ways of imparting specificity and momentum to negotiations on services.

The paper sought to give momentum to the ongoing WTO negotiations on services, which have not made much progress.

It is also an area in which India has a special interest in view of its strengths.

Outlining all relevant issues, emphasised that any complementary approach must supplement and not replace the existing 'request-offer' approach, which needed to be intensified.

"Such approach must preserve the basic architecture of General Agreement on Trade in services and the flexibility it provides particularly for developing countries, including the levels of development of individual members," it said.

The focus of any approach should be an improvement from the existing commitment, while taking into account the special situation of the newly acceding countries who have already taken extensive commitments at the time of their accession to the WTO, the paper emphasised.

The paper also identified the issue of possible numerical targets that needed discussion and said that any services package would have to include domestic regulations and that a clear direction was needed at the Hong Kong Ministerial for developing a sound basis for legal disciplines, an official statement said.

It was decided at the core group to share the paper with the WTO membership for both transparency and to facilitate moving ahead in this important area of negotiations.