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India has filed its revised offer on Services to the WTO (World Trade Organisation) on the 12th August 2005. This further builds on India’s initial offer on Services.
All the fresh commitments and/ or improvements in the offers are in line with the autonomous liberalisation already undertaken by India and the country is seeking to bind them in WTO in exchange for reciprocal commitments by our trading partners in the areas of interest to India.
This has offered commitments in a number of new sectors/sub sectors in mode 3 including architectural, integrated engineering and urban planning and landscape services; veterinary services; parts of distribution services; (excluding retail trade); additional sub sectors in construction and related engineering services and in tourism services; parts of educational services; life insurance services; services auxiliary to insurance,; asset management services; part of recreational cultural and sporting services and part of air transport services. New commitments have also been offered in cross border supply in other business services; professional services; research and development services; rental and leasing services; real estate services etc.
At the same time, improvements have been made in the existing mode 3 commitments by enhancing the foreign equity limit in engineering services; computer and related services (commitments have been proposed at the two digit level); research and development services; basic telecommunications; value added telecommunications; construction and related engineering services etc. In banking services, wholly owned subsidiaries have been allowed as a legal entity while in the case of non-banking financial activities, the foreign equity limits have been enhanced in the case of factoring, venture capital and financial leasing.
India had already made a substantial mode 4 offer in its initial offer by including all the categories of natural persons that it has been presenting multilaterally like contractual service suppliers and independent professionals. Further improvements have been made in the sectoral coverage of both the contractual service suppliers and independent professionals and the definition and parameters of these categories also brought in line with the common categories paper floated multilaterally by a large number of developing countries as well as some developed ones.
SB/SS
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