India is looking forward to Pakistan implementing its earlier decision to accord it the Most Favoured Nation (MFN) status when Commerce Secretaries of the two countries meet, a senior Government official said on Thursday.
Officials are indicated that the newly elected Pakistan Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif, had in a meeting with S.K. Lambah, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s Special Envoy, reiterated that the time for India and Pakistan to build a new relationship had come.
Sharif has also said that it was very much in the economic interests of Pakistan and India to take forward the co-operative relationship. Lambah met Sharif before he was sworn in as Prime Minister.
Pakistan was supposed to extend MFN status to India by the end of December 2012 by removing the ban on Indian products, but could not do so because of opposition from the farm, pharmaceuticals and auto lobbies.
Although Pakistan now allows imports of over 6,800 items from India, up from about 2,000 items earlier, it continues to ban 1,200 items.
Data Harvest
Meanwhile, India has mentioned to the US Ambassador its “interest in knowing” what transpired in the possibility of data relating to private communications of Indians being harvested.
The Guardian newspaper had recently acquired top secret documents about data mining used by the US National Security Agency, which showed that India came in fifth with 6.3 billion pieces of information being collected from the country’s computer and data networks in one month alone.
ashwini.phadnis@thehindu.co.in