A new visa regime that will take into account the specific problem of Chinese workers coming to India for unskilled employment on business visas is on the cards, according to top government sources.
Seeking to put India-China relations in perspective, these sources said 8,000 Indians were studying in China - mostly medicine - and with trade amounting to more than $50 billion, China was India's biggest trading partner in terms of volume of goods.
Indian companies were also expanding their business rapidly in China, with Ranbaxy having set up shop there as far back as in 1993. NIIT was running training institutions all over that country and the Tata group of companies, including Tata Consultancy Services, had a big footprint.
In the circumstances, knee-jerk reactions on visas were not advisable. However, these sources conceded India had a problem on its hands because of the peculiar nature of Chinese business in India. They were active, especially in power generation, equipment manufacture and steel refining.
As the nature of the work was either turnkey or contracted supply of equipment which narrowed the time window, the Chinese argued that it was necessary to ensure workers got visas quickly and were able to come to India, finish the work in the stipulated time and return.
But as the Indian economy had been growing and contracted heavy engineering work had been becoming the norm, it was time to revisit the visa regime taking into account the changed needs of both countries.
These sources conceded that in many cases, locals objected to Chinese workers doing low-end work. These problems had been seen over the last two or three years and it was now necessary to regulate visas "a little more tightly".
What the government envisages is a dispensation that would create a new visa for a specific category of work for a specific time frame.
The Ministry of Home Affairs is in consultation with the Ministry of External Affairs to resolve this problem, these sources said.
They also said that while a number of problems between China and India arose because of outstanding boundary issues, at no time had China indicated that it would stop talking to India. In fact, China's objections on Arunachal Pradesh being considered a part of India, on the continued presence of the Dalai Lama and sundry other issues had been consistently discussed and for the Indian government amounted to no more than 'taken as read' these sources said.
Where India needed to protest it had done so: if Kashmiri citizens were being granted visas on separate sets of paper and their citizenship was being questioned, India had raised its objections strongly. And by the same logic, it had questioned China's right to build infrastructure projects (as it did last week) in the Pakistan-occupied Kashmir region that India considers is disputed territory.
On the border, these sources said it was not correct that 13 rounds of talks between the two countries had yielded nothing at all: guiding principles and parameters for the talks had been established. But at the same time, inadvertent violation of the borders was not an issue that the two countries considered war-like action.
These sources recalled that China's language was no less offensive in 1986 when Arunachal Pradesh became a state or when the Dalai Lama, the spiritual head of the Tibetan community tended to make political statements from Indian soil. But this did not mean a deterioration in relations. On the contrary, the Chinese leadership had always emphasised the need for engagement.
