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'India to open up economy totally by 2001'

India will completely open up its market by March 2001, a top foreign trade official said today.

Anil Swarup, export commissioner at the Directorate General of Foreign Trade, said at a business seminar in New Delhi that import barriers on hundreds of products would be lifted soon.

"We will remove quantitative restrictions on over 700 items remaining before March 31, 2001. From April 1, 2001, India will become a free economy where anything and everything can be imported, except for a small negative list," he said.

India, which ended more than four decades of socialist-style protectionism in 1991, further liberalised its import laws last month, opening the door to 714 new foreign products in line with its World Trade Organisation, or WTO, commitments.

Announcing the trade policy for the fiscal year beginning April, Commerce Minister Murasoli Maran said the items, which could now be freely imported included gherkins, music systems, cigarettes, salt, decaffeinated coffee and caviar.

Despite the liberalisation, 715 items such as raw silk, betel nuts, trawlers and sailboats still remain on the restricted list and require special licences to be imported in small quantities.

To meet WTO conditions, India has agreed to remove all quantitative restrictions on imports by 2002. But the United States has urged India to free all imports by 2001. India is one of the most protectionist economies in the world with a top tariff rate of 40 percent.

Swarup, however, said restrictions in some developed countries on goods such as textiles should also be lifted.

"We would like to see a real opening of world economies like doing away with all types and kinds of restrictions in free trade," he said.