The BRICS Contact Group on Economic and Trade Issues (CGETI) held its first meeting under India's Chairship from March 9-11, wherein India outlined the priority areas to be delivered on which also included non-tariff measures and resolution mechanism among the countries of the group.

The theme of BRICS this year is "BRICS@15: Intra BRICS Cooperation for Continuity, Consolidation, and Consensus". During the meeting India presented the calendar of events for BRICS CGETI 2021, which included the priority areas for deliverables, schedule and scope of the MSME roundtable conference workshop on Services Statistics, and the BRICS Trade Fair.

"This was followed by a series of presentations, scheduled in separate sessions, made by the concerned departments of the Government of India on the proposed deliverables during India's Chairship under the BRICS CGETI track," said an official statement.

The deliverables proposed included the action plan based on the document "Strategy for BRICS Economic Partnership 2025" adopted during Russian Presidency in 2020 and BRICS Cooperation on Multilateral Trading system including cooperation for the TRIPS Waiver proposal at WTO.

"Framework for consumer protection in e-commerce, non-tariff measures (NTM), resolution mechanism, sanitary and phyto-sanitary (SPS) working mechanism", among others.

A co-operation framework for protection of genetic resources and traditional knowledge and BRICS framework on co-operation in professional services were also proposed.

The Commerce Ministry statement said that the BRICS partners appreciated the activities planned by India, being timely and relevant in the current context and expressed their support for working together on the various initiatives proposed by India.

From now on till September 2021, inter-sessional deliberations will be carried out to reach a consensus amongst the BRICS countries. The BRICS officers tasked with CGETI would continue the work for the 27th official level CGETI meeting, scheduled to be held in June 2021, it said.

(IANS)