Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-09-27-Speech-3-264"
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"en.20060927.21.3-264"2
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"Mr President, let me add my congratulations to Mr Karim on an excellent report.
As his report clearly demonstrates, when we are discussing India, the first problem is to decide which India we are discussing. Is it the India with nearly four million households earning over EUR 150 000 a year and with more graduates than any other country? Or is it the India with 390 million people living on less than a dollar a day, where two out of five of people are illiterate and where the so-called IT revolution only touches one in fifty Indians? I hope, as a Parliament, we are interested in both.
If India overcomes its infrastructure problems, most notably its persistent power cuts and poor transport networks, then I believe that within a generation it has the potential to be Europe’s largest trading partner, more important than China or the United States. I therefore welcome what Commissioner Borg said about the High Level Trade Group’s recommendations. I believe we should intensify our trade and investment relations with India. However, at this stage, I agree with Mrs Mann and Mr Papastamkos that we should stop short of a free-trade area, because we would not want India to be used as an example to denigrate the prospect of a successful DDA outcome. We must put our eggs in the DDA basket first and foremost, and anything else should be seen as a digression from that.
Mr Papastamkos rightly points out that 77% of Indian goods come into the EU market duty-free through the GSP. The GSP places an obligation on India to improve its core labour standards. India must do more to tackle child labour and bonded labour, and must sign up to ILO Convention 98 on the right to organise and the right to collective bargaining. India signed up to the Millennium Development Goals and the EU, with our cooperation, should help by facilitating universal education, Eurohealth programmes and policies to get young people from poor areas into work.
I believe that trade and development go hand in hand, but only if we work at it. It will not be automatic. We must have the political will to deliver on both. I welcome the report’s emphasis on both those aspects of our relations with India."@en1
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