EU-India Rome Meet To Achieve Greater People-to-people Contact

After the prime ministers, the people. In other words, key members of India?s civil society will meet their European counterparts in Rome next week, after the high-profile summit meeting in New Delhi of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and the Presidency of the 15-nation European Union (EU) on November 29.

The Italian minister of state for foreign affairs, Margherita Boniver, will provide the link between the two meetings. She represented the EU Presidency at the EU-India Summit, after Prime Minister Berlusconi was suddenly taken ill. Ms Boniver will speak on EU-India relations in the light of the Italian Presidency.

Leading members of Indian business and industry as well as trade union leaders, newspaper editors, academics, and heads of civil society organisations will be attending the sixth meeting of the India-EU Round Table. The Round Table was inaugurated in New Delhi in February, 2001, by the then foreign minister Jaswant Singh, and the EU?s Commissioner for external relations, Chris Patten.

The Rome meeting on December 16 and 17 will be chaired jointly by NN Vohra, facilitator for Jammu and Kashmir, and Roger Briesch, president of the European Economic and Social Committee in Brussels. Mr Vohra has co-chaired Round Table meetings since its inception in 2001.

Business leaders at the Rome gathering will include Dr Amit Mitra, secretary-general, Ficci; Tarun Das, director general, CII; Amit Burman, president, Confederation of Indian Foods and Trade Industry; DK Nair, secretary-general, Indian Cotton Mills Federation and Anuradha J Desai, chairperson, Venkateshwara Hatcheries, Pune.

Sitting alongside them will be the working president and vice-president of the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh, MM Venugopal and K Thakkar, and secretary of the Indian National Trade Unions Congress (INTUC), AN Manjappa. A key item on the agenda of the two-day meeting is a discussion on barriers to trade and investment flows between India and the EU. A German trade union representative, Karin Alleweldt, will present her paper, outlining some of the main issues, while Dr Amit Mitra will launch the discussion.

Given that both the Round Table and the annual India-EU Business Summit regularly look at ways of improving trade and investment between India and the EU, there is clearly room for joint initiatives. The task of drafting such initiatives is made easier by the fact that the business summit is organised jointly by Ficci and CII. At its fifth meeting, held in Bangalore in March, the Round Table made a number of recommendations to the EU-India political summit in New Delhi last month. They included cooperation between small and medium-sized industries in India and Europe in sustainable development and human rights in the work place. Earlier recommendations to the Government of India and the EU institutions, for their consideration and implementation, have covered food and agri-business; investment, trade, globalisation and intellectual property, and human capital and issues of migration of skilled workers.

Closer cooperation between the Round Table and the India-EU Business Summit is clearly in the interest of both Indian and European companies. European members of the Round Table are drawn from the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC). This is a consultative body which was set up in 1958, under the very same treaty that established the European Economic Community (EEC), which has since transformed itself into the European Union (EU).

The Round Table?s European members include five leading members of business and employers organisations. They come from the German wholesale and foreign trade confederation; the Portuguese wholesale trade association; the Dutch umbrella employers organisation of the agricultural and horticultural sectors; the confederation of Finnish industry and employers, and the general confederation representing Italian trade, tourism, services and small and medium-sized enterprises.

The EU-India Round Table, unlike the India-EU business summit, offers both its members and civil society in general, an opportunity to share experiences and exchange views and information on a year-round basis. The Round Table already has its internet website, the EU-India Forum.

The forum, which has been set up by the European members provisionally, will be further developed by the full Round Table in Rome. The forum (1) allows the members of the Round Table to keep in touch with each other, and (2) enables Indian and European civil society organisations to contribute to the work of the Round Table.

The Indian government has already agreed to provide the funds needed to meet the operating costs of the internet forum in India. A similar political decision is now awaited from the European side.

The forum can count on the expertise of the two Round Table members from the media. They are the editors of The Hindustan Times and The Financial Express, Vir Sanghvi and Sanjaya Baru, respectively. The former is the Round Table?s media co-rapporteur, together with Ms Anne-Marie Sigmund, and the co-author with her of its report on the role of the media in promoting and strengthening the civil society.

Dr Baru, who has only recently joined the Round Table, will speak at the Rome meeting on the state of India-EU relations. Other civil society representatives at the Rome meeting will include the chairperson of the Infosys Foundation, Sudha Murthy and Mira Chatterjee, co-ordinator, SEWA. Academia will be represented by Prof Goverdhan Mehta, director, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore; Prof Bina Agarwal, Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi, and Prof Indira Rajaram, National Institute of Public Finance and Policy.