Indian elections and subsequent political developments have come as a glitch to the process of evolving a new proposal on the contentious farm sector negotiations at the World Trade Organisation.
Brazilian Ambassador Felipe de Seixas Corra assured the ongoing WTO General Council meeting in Geneva that G-20, of which India is a key member, would make every effort to finalise a proposal before the negotiating group talks begin on June 2.
But, he said, India had been in the process of installing a new government, which was something people would have to take account of, according to reports reaching here from Geneva.
At a meeting of 28 WTO trade ministers last week in Paris, the G20 and the Cairns Group of 17 agriculture exporting countries had said they would work to come up with a new market-access formula.
India's ambassador to the WTO, K M Chandrasekhar, had reportedly said on Monday that the new government in the country would need some time to 'assess the situation.'
The US is believed to have asked G-20 and Cairns groups to complete their proposals in the next 10 days as such a timeline would give members enough time to digest the proposal before the agriculture negotiating group meets again.
The economic growth in West Bengal over the last two decades had been rapid with contribution from agriculture, rural industries and small-scale services sectors but the organised sector had stagnated, the report said.
Per capita consumption had increased and poverty reduced, but there had been a sharp rural-urban difference with growing income disparity between Kolkata and the districts.
Observing that lack of adequate productive employment opportunities was probably the most pressing socio-economic problem in the state, the report said that employment in the formal sector had fallen and the general pattern of job creation had shifted towards the more casual, marginal, part-time and insecure contracts or self-employment.
"Paid employment of women, which was already low by national standards, has diminished further in relative terms in the recent past. However, there has been very substantial diversification of rural employment away from agriculture, which can be linked with the expansion of output in small-scale manufacturing and services," the report said.
While lauding the state government for being the only in the country to hold elections of the local bodies every five years since it came to power in 1977, the report said there was scope for increasing the ability of the local bodies to improve conditions of public health and education by allowing them greater control over local public service delivery.
