New Delhi, 05 October (H.S.): Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said on Monday that a new framework for Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs) has been prepared and is expected to receive approval from the Union Cabinet soon, with the aim of making it more investor-friendly. Despite the framework being finalised, India continues to negotiate investment protection agreements with several countries.

Nirmala Sitharaman made the remarks during a discussion at the Munich Security Conference in New Delhi. She said the new framework, which had been under preparation for the past one-and-a-half years, seeks to address shortcomings in the framework approved in 2016 and provide more effective protection to investors from both countries. She said India had also entered into similar agreements with the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Oman and several Central Asian countries. “We are negotiating with several countries, and many more provisions incorporated in the new framework are being included in these negotiations,” she said.

The Finance Minister said India was continuing negotiations on bilateral investment protection agreements with several countries, including Canada and Russia. If the talks progress as expected, negotiations with Canada could be concluded by December or early next year.

On the India-US trade agreement,Nirmala Sitharaman said it had not yet been finalised and that the negotiations had been “difficult”. However, she said both sides appeared to have reached a point where making further concessions had become “very, very difficult”. She added that if there was still some room for movement, both sides would perhaps explore it.

Nirmala Sitharaman said a key feature of India-US trade relations was the trade imbalance in India’s favour, while the United States was seeking to reduce its trade deficit. She said the US would, from its own perspective, seek to compensate for areas where it believed it had suffered losses over the years.

Comparing India’s trade relationship with China, Sitharaman said trade imbalances had traditionally been addressed through negotiations, with countries seeking greater market access for their goods and services. However, she noted that tariffs were increasingly being used as a tool to address trade imbalances.

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Hindusthan Samachar / Jun Sarkar