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G. Srinivasan

NEW DELHI, Jan. 4

THE three-day visit of the British Minister for Trade and Industry, Ms Patricia Hewitt, to India from January 6 marks the high-point of a year-long celebration of Indo-British Partnership (IBP) as also "a successful" culmination of a decade of a dynamic alliance, besides boosting the numbers of joint ventures and volume of investment between Indian and UK companies in the coming years.

Disclosing this to Business Line here in an interview, the Director of Trade & Investment Promotion Counsellor (Economic and Commercial) of British High Commission here, Mr John Dennis said the "tremendously successful" partnership stretches from working in close concert to combating terrorism to trade, investment, environment, information technology, reforming international financial architecture, development and science and technology.

He said UK-India bilateral trade of goods and services has grown by 67 per cent since the IBP was launched in 1983. Major items of UK exports to India include diamonds, gold, silver, power generating and telecom equipment, transport equipment and industrial machinery and the UK imports from India include textiles and readymade garments, gems and jewellery, footwear, metal manufactures, power generating equipment, organic chemicals, vegetables and fruit.

He said Ms Hewitt's visit is designed to promote the UK as a key trade, investment and political partner for India in the light of the new declaration, which was signed, by Mr Tony Blair and Mr A.B.Vajpayee, when the two Prime Ministers met in New Delhi in January 2002.

Mr Dennis said that during the first half of 2002, exports of goods from UK to India have crossed £999.5 million and UK import from India have also crossed £931 million .

In 2001, UK exported goods worth £1,782 million to India and imported goods worth £1,884 million from India. He said that India is fast emerging as an important source of investment in the UK with his country holding the third share of 7.8 per cent of new investment approved since 1991, well ahead of Germany, Japan and France.

Asked about the constraints preventing the full potentials of trade and investment from being realised, Mr Dennis said: "I am not aware of any enormous problems".

On the other hand, the Indo-UK Economic conference held in last July was a success and its outcome was the creation of a working group on trade and policy that would encourage an increase in bilateral trade and investment to £10 billion in five years.

He said the trade policy of UK focused on nine "priority" sectors, including education and training, automotive, agri-business, environment, healthcare, IT, recreation and leisure, telecommunications and financial services. Besides, he said, creative industries, fire, safety and security, bio-technology, retail and oil and gas have been "identified" as the emerging sectors.

He said that when there was a wide-range of sectors for bilateral cooperation, each company in each sector would often "tell us how particular laws altered or particular regulations introduced" mid-course would affect it; "but as there is a dynamic relationship across the board," these shortcomings do not cause major friction in relations, he added.

Mr Dennis pointed out that "our task on both sides is to facilitate exploring business opportunities and it is for the business people to decide where to put their capital".

However, certain priorities were being identified and these include three criteria, he said stating that "first is to identify demonstrable opportunities for UK companies to invest and second is to ensure that they should be able both to take up that opportunity and be willing to do so and the third is governance per se," where local laws and other regulatory issues remain fair to investors.

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