Getting Wen’s attention

Dr Singh stepped in to assure ASEAN leaders that India is serious about free trade and promised to conclude the negotiations by end 2006. Internally, Dr Singh put enormous pressure on the system to demonstrate flexibility.

While India has brought down the negative list to about 500, it insists on dealing with palm oil, a major export item from ASEAN, separately. ASEAN wants India to reduce its negative list to about 170-odd items. With talks going nowhere, ASEAN has apparently threatened to increase its own negative list to about 1,000 items.

If last year’s meetings are any guide, the India-ASEAN trade differences will be out in the open and could cloud Dr Singh’s visit to the Philippines.

Strategic railways

It’s not just on trade, even on mega transport projects, like the trans-Asian Railways,China is way ahead of India. More than three years ago, Prime Minister Vajpayee talked about a rail link between New Delhi and Hanoi in Vietnam. All India needed to do was to build a missing link of about 315 km between India’s Northeast and Myanmar. While the Indian project is languishing, China is all set to complete the rail line between Singapore and Kunming, in the South Western Yunnan province, by 2015. While laying a new rail line towards the Yunnan border, China is also funding the construction of various missing links in South East Asia.

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