The Government of India entered into negotiation with the European Commission (EC) in June 2007 on the EU-India Free Trade Agreement (FTA) and since then the government has consistently refused to share information with the people, including their democratically elected representatives. The government has continued to negotiate free trade agreements (FTAs) despite widespread resistance of citizens to WTO-mandated trade liberalization in general and FTAs in particular.

FTAs entail much greater access to domestic markets through a massive reduction of import duties and include trade in services, priority to investor rights, tighter intellectual property standards, unfair competition policy and restricted government procurement. The ASEAN-India FTA was signed without Chief Ministers of different states seeing the offer of goods to the ten ASEAN countries. The Korea-India FTA was signed in complete secrecy in August 2009. Many of the subjects that are being negotiated in these FTAs are state and concurrent subjects in the constitution, yet consent of states and parliament has not been obtained.

The EU-India FTA paves the road for:

1. TRIPS-plus intellectual property protection: In light of the recent Supreme Court judgment in the Novartis patent case on the cancer drug Glivec, the EU’s demands for TRIPS-plus intellectual property (IP) rights will not just intensify monopolies over seed and encourage proprietary agriculture technologies – such as GM crops and fish, it will also threaten access to affordable medicines by limiting the ability of the Government to issue compulsory licenses on medicines through legislative and policy amendments to expand the scope of IP protection and enforcement.

2. Liberalization in investment and services: The EU calls for India to set out a single schedule of commitments for services and investments. The EU is also stressing