The Cabinet committee on WTO this week will provide the mandate for India's negotiators to deal with various subjects at the Cancun ministerial starting next week, including agreeing to commencement of negotiations on the contentious Singapore issues.
Government officials said the commerce ministry continued to oppose negotiations on the four issues: investment, competition policy, trade facilitation and transparency in government procurement.
The ministry has circulated a Cabinet note, which explains the current scenario on the four subjects, for comments from various ministries.
The Cabinet committee had met a fortnight ago to take stock of the state of play in agriculture after a group of 20 countries including India, Brazil and China filed a joint framework to counter the US-EU joint paper on the subject.
The details of how much leeway Indian negotiators had on various issues such as subsidies and market access would be decided at the meeting, officials said. They, however, said the date for the meeting had not been finalised so far.
Officials also said the recommendations of the inter-ministerial group on non agricultural market access, dealing mainly with industrial tariff issues, would also be discussed and a decision on issues like duty removal in case of certain sectors would be finalised.
Government departments like textiles have proposed maintaining duty level of around 5 per cent in case India managed zero duty for its exports to other countries.
