EU-India FTA and game negotiations most difficult: Khullar

BRUSSELS - India’s Commerce Secretary Rahul Khullar on Friday said that end game negotiations relating to the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) between the European Union and New Delhi could be expected to be the most difficult.

When asked whether the negotiations were 50 percent complete, or still in the 25 percent range, Khullar said: “Remember a deal is not done until it is all done. So, on that criterion, nothing is done. I think more than half of it is actually being completed. What are you doing is you are entering into what are called last mile or end game negotiations. What happens in end game negotiations is typically all the very very difficult stuff is left right to the end.”

“Those require very difficult decisions, but at the end of it, what happens is, when there are so much on the table, the incentive to deal with those difficult decisions is are you really going to wash away all that you have settled, just because you cannot grapple with this difficult problem, and that, in a sense, forces people to grapple and quickly come to a solution. So, I think that is the way to look at it,” he added.

Khullar declined to quote the exact figures, but said over 50 percent of the work is complete.

“I don’t want to use numbers, but I think more than 50 percent is done,” he said. By Smita Prakash (ANI)