India urges China to liberalize visa regime for Indian professionals
Published: Jul 16, 2018
By TIOLCORPLAWS News Service
NEW DELHI, JULY 16, 2018: India has urged China to liberalize its visa regime for Indian professionals who are at present given work permits for only one year. Raising the matter during the China's trade policy review at the World Trade Organization (WTO) last week, India highlighted the challenges Indian businesses face while doing business in China.
China had recently shown willingness to address India's long-pending concerns on the trade front. Both sides held their long-pending 11th joint economic group meeting in May on one-month notice from the Chinese side and agreed to draw up a medium- and long-term roadmap with action points and timelines to address the trade deficit between them.
India's representative at the WTO in a statement said that in the services sector, the challenges for Indian firms include complex requirements for participating in contracts of the state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and issues related to qualification requirements, licensing and taxation. However, a later visit by Zhang Shaogang, director general in the Chinese ministry of commerce in June to resolve bilateral differences over Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) commitments was not very successful, as India refused to agree to China's demand to eliminate tariffs in more than 90% of traded goods.
Holding that there is great scope for collaboration between Chinese state-owned enterprises and the Indian IT sector which could provide state-of-the-art custom-designed solutions, India asked for more openness of Chinese SOEs to accessing those services.
There had been a few success stories in India-China collaboration in the services sector. The Indian software lobby group National Association of Software and Services Companies had signed a joint investment agreement in December with the China's Dalian Municipal People's Govt to develop a collaborative technology platform to leverage each other's strength in technology. Apollo Hospitals is also building a modern hospital partnering with the Hainan Ecological Smart City Group.