India has raised objections to Article 2 of the draft of the trade facilitation agreement (TFA) proposed by Bangladesh in the working group meeting of the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC), insiders said.
The two day working group meeting on trade facilitation of the BIMSTEC countries ended in the capital on Monday.
There are 21 articles in the draft TFA proposed by Bangladesh.
"In principle, member countries have agreed to all the articles except Article 2 which deals with the issue of scope and coverage of the TFA," a senior official who represented Bangladesh in the meeting told the FE.
Bangladesh proposed that all gamut of the cross-border trade will be included in the TFA but India wants to include only 'Customs procedures' under the coverage of the TFA, said the official preferring anonymity.
However, the participants expressed satisfaction about the working group meeting since it was able to review all the 21 articles.
In the first working group meeting, only two articles were reviewed.
Some members opined to scrutinise Article 14 and 15 which deal with the issue of customs cooperation.
They argued that as BIMSTEC already has a separate Customs Cooperation Agreement, these articles should be analysed to avoid duplicity.
The members decided to hold the next working group meeting in Bhutan in the sidelines of the Trade Negotiations Committee meeting.
Bhutanese delegation said they would confirm the event after discussing with their higher authorities.
TFA is important to enact free trade agreement within the BIMSTEC platform of the seven countries-Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, Bhutan and Nepal, officials said.
This is the second meeting of the trade facilitation working group. The first one was also held in Dhaka in November last year in the sidelines of the trade negotiations committee (TNC) meeting.
The intra-regional trade in the BIMSTEC region is very low --6.0 per cent-compared to the 24 per cent of the ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) grouping.
With a population of 1.7 billion and a combined gross domestic products (GDP) of US$ 3.7 trillion, the true potential of the BIMSTEC can be exploited after the implementation of the free trade agreement (FTA).
