The Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) today demanded a comprehensive government strategy to ensure a level playing field for the domestic industry including small and medium enterprises."A government strategy, consistent with our internal reforms, is needed to ensure level playing field. How the FTAs would help us in signing multilaterals also needs to be evaluated," R Seshasayee, newly-elected CII President, said in an interview.Asked if the industry felt it was being pushed into a FTA regime, Seshasayee said, "We had a premonition about an approaching FTA regime. We were surprised at the number of FTAs and the speed, particularly the speed with which FTAs were signed with couple of countries".Seshasayee, however, advocated FTAs with countries that had capital, technology, huge markets and offered certain complementarities.Reforms needed to be managed carefully besides taking ample precautions of necessary safegaurds like stringent rules of origin (ROO). "We should have an organised way and look at the complimentary competencies between the countries, then the FTAs will work better and will be more sustainable," Seshasayee said.The government needs to evolve a mechanism for ROOs, which should be the same for all the FTA partner countries, as different ROOs would complicate the situation more, Seshasayee said.
