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India and the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) bloc were able to stitch together a trade deal after negotiations spread over just a year because both sides respected each other’s sensitivities and aimed for a balanced agreement, a top Swiss official said on Sunday.
The Trade and Economic Partnership Agreement (TEPA) signed by India and the bloc comprising Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland is set to facilitate easy services exports and allow scaling up of cutting-edge technologies in the large Indian market. It includes a commitment by the four countries on investments of $100 billion and creating a million jobs in India over 15 years.
The Swiss state secretary for economic affairs, Helene Budliger Artieda, who met commerce minister Piyush Goyal 10 times in less than a year, said in an interview that the clear definition of ground rules and principles after the two sides resumed discussions on the trade deal last year helped drive the negotiations.
Both sides “wanted to have a balanced deal” and to “respect each other’s sensitivities”, and India’s evolution in the handling of intellectual property rights (IPR) in recent years also facilitated discussions in an area that is important for Switzerland, she said.
“This time around, India has been able to give us something which was important for our pharma…not obliging our pharma to multiply production hubs in the world,” Artieda said.
In this context, Artieda referred to the “pre-grant opposition” process, whereby entities can oppose a foreign firm’s patent application in India, and said the Swiss pharmaceutical industry sometimes felt this “was endless”. She added, “The fact that under minister Goyal’s leadership, I understand the Patent Office has hired new staff. So, they were able to deal with pending issues much faster. India sort of met us somewhere in the middle.”
While it wasn’t possible for Switzerland to push for “TRIPS-plus language” in the TEPA, it was important “that we would jot down into this IPR chapter Trips language commitments that India had already undergone in the framework of WTO”, she said.
Artieda referred to the commitment on investments and job creation in the TEPA and said this was part of efforts to create a balance between the market of 1.4 billion people in India and the market of about 15 million in EFTA states. “The four of us are large FDI net exporters…we just never did the pledge in a free trade agreement,” she said.
“This is where we did the investment pledge and it is connected to the access to the market. So should we, in 15 years, not be able to pledge or to actually underlie with concrete investment projects this $100 billion and the one million jobs, then there will be a revision,” she said.
Artieda also said Switzerland’s state secretariat for migration has been discussing a bilateral mobility and migration agreement with India that will focus on young professionals who could come and work in Switzerland after getting a master’s or a PhD degree in certain areas of interest. She also said the four EFTA states don’t have a common standard for migration, which in Switzerland is handled by the cantons or states.
“It’s not finalised yet,” she said, adding she was sure Swiss companies would take advantage of such an agreement.
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