Raise tariff walls to stop Chinese dumping

By Our Special Correspondent

CHENNAI, DEC. 14. To stem uninhibited dumping, the Society for Indian Automobile Manufacturers (SIAM) has asked the Centre to immediately raise tariff walls to stop the Chinese on their tracks.

In a free-wheeling informal interaction with select presspersons here today, the President of SIAM, Mr. Venu Srinivasan, and its Vice-President, Mr. R. Seshasayee, said since China and India had complementary skill and competed for the same space in the global marketplace, the ``strategic kind of invasion made by the Chinese'' must be halted.

Though Mr. Seshasayee felt that India would have to come to terms with China in the long run, he admitted that it would require to be cleared first by the ``political desk''. In the meanwhile, however, New Delhi should ensure that the ``economy is not hallowed down'' by the Chinese dumping. Since Beijing was not a member of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), they felt check- mating the Chinese would be that much simpler.

Creating tariff barriers against a recalcitrant non-member of WTO, in their reckoning, was perfectly justified. Mr. Seshasayee said the plea for building trade barriers against them should be read in the context of non-existence of accounting system in China.

Both, however, hastened to assure that SIAM was not against competition based on `fair pricing'. Mr. Venu Srinivasan was convinced that unlike the U.S. which did not mind letting in Chinese goods unmindful of the job loss it had caused to the Americans, manpower-rich India could not just simply turn blind to the Chinese aggression into the Indian marketplace. Even if China joined the WTO, India could still use the tariff mechanism as long as it did not practice transparency in trade, Mr. Seshasayee pointed out.

Quizzed if SIAM had sounded the Government on punitive action against dumping from China, they replied in the negative. ``We are in the process of information gathering mode,'' said Mr. Seshasayee. Asked if the Chinese dumping was the only threat from across the shores for the domestic economy, the SIAM vice- president saw in `technology divide' much greater injury to developing economies, in general and in particular to India. The technology divide, he felt, had ensured that a majority of intellectual properties resided in the West. In the name of harmonising technology, the West (the owners of these properties) invariably sought to set standards for technology.

Mr. Seshasayee saw a catch here. ``Setting standards without a mechanism to transfer technology at affordable price'' would result in developing nations perpetually dependent on the West, he pointed out. In this context, Mr. Seshasayee felt that India should lobby for making ``all environmental factors globally competitive.''

``We don't lack intellectual skills but only the ability to translate them at shop-floor levels,'' he said. The Vice- President felt that ``we need a politically savvy Government to be able to leverage the market.'' He was convinced `strategic action' by the Government needed to be speeded up. ``That is not happening,'' he rued, nonetheless.

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