In an effort to stitch the proposed free trade agreement (FTA) between India and EU by the end of this year, trade officials from both sides are going to engage in a series of meetings starting August.
In the recent past, the two sides have differed sharply on the details of the FTA. While New Delhi has insisted that issues relating to child labour and environment should be kept beyond the purview of the FTA, the EU has argued that any trade agreement should be comprehensive in nature.
In a conference organised by Ficci in the capital on Friday, ambassador of The EU delegation to India Daniele Smadja said the two sides would start a series of meetings in the EU capital of Brussels. ?In the last week of August, chief negotiators are meeting in Brussels. Commerce minister Anand Sharma and the EU trade commissioner Karel De Gucht will meet on the margins of an international meeting in Vietnam at the same time,? she said.
According to commerce ministry sources, the EU is pushing for setting up of a civil society advisory board, which will address issues of environment and child labour. This is significant since it implies that such issues would not be a part of the formal FTA but taken care of by a separate body—a demand that India has been pushing since the FTA talks first began in 2007.