INDIA TO RAISE HSMP CHANGES IN TRADE TALKS WITH UK
By Dipankar De Sarkar, London, December 12, 2007(IANS)

A powerful Indian delegation led by Commerce and Industry Minister Kamal Nath is expected to tell Britain that its sudden back-dated tightening of visa rules is a protectionist barrier that severely disadvantages thousands of highly skilled Indians living and working in Britain. The Joint Economic and Trade Committee (JETCO) meeting is the fourth in an annual series but assumes importance as it comes just ahead of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown's planned visit to India in January. Inputs from the discussions will be taken forward to meetings between Brown and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

With more and more Western countries wooing Indian companies for trade and investment, the Indian delegation is expected to tell British ministers that it is vital for highly skilled Indian workers to be able to live and work freely in Britain if globalisation is to work for both wealthy nations and powerful and rapidly growing so-called 'emerging economies'.

Britain introduced its Highly Skilled Migrants Programme (HSMP) visa in 2002 in a bid to attract workers such as doctors and scientists, but political opposition coupled with its obligation to accept workers from new member-states of the European Union saw it make changes to the scheme in 2006.

Significantly, however, the new rules - favouring younger, higher earners and doing away with some previous criteria - were made applicable retrospectively, which meant that many of those who had come in before 2006 could face deportation.

There are no accurate estimates of the numbers involved but thousands of Indians are thought to be among 49,000 people the British parliament's Joint Committee on Human Rights says could face deportation.

The committee also says the government could be in breach of the European Human Rights Convention by retrospectively applying the new HSMP regulations, but Home Affairs Minister Vernon Coaker gave an assurance in August that the majority of highly skilled migrants would be allowed to live and work in Britain.

From New Delhi's point of view, the issue is one of globalisation and fairness because its huge pool of highly skilled workers - a major economic asset - needs to be able to live and work freely in wealthy countries in order to realise its full economic potential.

India, leading a broad-based coalition of large developing countries at ongoing world trade talks, has been arguing forcefully for rich nations to dismantle barriers toward the temporary movement of skilled workers in so-called Mode 4 negotiations.

Faced with arbitrary changes to their visas and having spent money in settling down, many Indian workers in Britain feel frustrated and unwanted.

Many have already moved out to the US, Australia and other countries and some have returned to India, according to pressure groups that have formed around the HSMP issue. And this is a constituency that Indian governments cannot ignore if they are to promote economic reforms at home.

From Britain's perspective, too, this is a prickly issue. On the one hand, the country is faced with a demographic trough of increasing numbers of old people, requiring migrant labour. On the other, the Labour government, after a decade in power, is facing mounting criticism from political opponents over bungling on migration, which has become a major issue.

According to figures released Monday, more than 80 percent of the 2.1 million new jobs created between 1997 and 2007 were taken by migrant workers, prompting one Tory Party MP, Chris Grayling, to say: "This finally destroys any claim the government has to be able to talk about British jobs for British workers. It also destroys any confidence about the government's claims on their record on jobs. Gordon Brown's... policies have clearly been an abject failure and all he's done is create British jobs for foreign workers."

Apart from the JETCO talks, Minister Nath will also launch a book that he has written, titled "India's Century", at a reception organised by the Confederation of Indian Industries in the presence of business leaders Sunil Bharti Mittal, Laxmi Mittal, Mukesh Ambani and others.