India and the European Union (EU) are working together to finish the legal scrubbing of their Free Trade Agreement (FTA) in the next 15-20 days, Commerce and Industry Piyush Goyal said Monday.
“I had a very good conversation with my counterpart (EU Trade Commissioner Maros Sefcivic) on Sunday. I am meeting him on July 14 and 15 in Brussels along with a delegation of business persons,” Goyal said at the Council of Leather Exports (CLE) Export Excellence Awards.
India and EU completed negotiations on the FTA in January this year and now are working on the legal text of the deal. Trade lawyers from India and the EU are conducting a line-by-line verification of the draft text to eliminate ambiguities.
Once the text is verified and translated into the EU’s official languages, the European Commission will formally propose it to the Council of the European Union. The Council must vote to authorise the official signing of the agreement.
The signing of the agreement is expected before the end of this year and the agreement is likely to be operationalised by March next year.
He asked leather exporters to aim for $15 billion of exports in the next 5-6 years from around $4.5 billion. “We should look at diversifying our markets. Today 77% of our exports goes only to 15 nations. I think now there is time to diversify all over the world,” he added.