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Vallarpadam work to start this year: Minister

By Our Staff Reporter

THRISSUR AUG. 23. The Union Minister of State for Law, P. C. Thomas, has said that the Prime Minister, A. B. Vajpayee, has assured him that the work on the proposed Vallarpadam container terminal would be inaugurated this year itself.

Inaugurating the first convention of the Kerala Entrepreneurs Forum (KEF) here today, the Minister said the Prime Minister had given him the assurance when he had met him to seek quick implementation of the assurances given by him during the recent Global Investor Meet (GIM) in Kochi.

The Vallarpadam container terminal, expected to cost about Rs. 2,000 crores, would be one of the biggest container terminals in the world.

The Prime Minister had promised to implement schemes costing Rs. 10,000 crores, which had come up at the GIM. Many of the potential schemes were not being implemented in the State because of the lack of follow-up action, he said. The State would develop rapidly if it could project its merits properly. For instance, events such as the Thrissur Pooram offered great scope for tourism development. The same was the case with tender coconut, he said. Referring to the demand for a hike in the import duty on products such as rubber and coconut, the Union Minister said this was an extremely complex task because of the conditions of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) agreement, which India had signed.

The import duty on rubber and coconut, along with 10,000-odd products, had been included in the `bound rate tariffs', and if India wanted to hike this rate, it would have to accept tariff-changing proposals for other products from other countries as compensation, he said.

The Minister said that even though the negotiations for the WTO agreement had given many opportunities for India to demand higher import duty for items such as rubber and coconut, the country could not argue its case properly.

The political leadership was not actively involved in the negotiations and the officials who actually struck the deal had failed to present our case properly. And now, India was not able to come out of the trap caused by the failures in the WTO negotiations, the Minister said.

The developed countries were continuing with their high rates of domestic subsidies against the WTO stipulations. Even if the subsidy rates were cut in the next round of WTO negotiations at Cancun, India would not be affected because the country already had lower subsidy rates, he said.

He said the Commerce Ministry had started discussions with various sections as a preparatory work for the next round of WTO negotiations. Efforts were already on to tide over the setbacks suffered in the earlier WTO agreement and to evolve better packages for the Indian industry and agriculture, Mr. Thomas said.

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