ASEAN and India Seal Trade, Cooperation Pacts With Eye on "Asian Century"

VIENTIANE, Nov 30 (AFP)

India and 10 Southeast Asian nations Tuesday signed a "prosperity" blueprint focused on plans for a full free-trade area by 2016 and political and security cooperation to combat terrorism. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his counterparts from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) inked a "Partnership for Peace, Progress and Shared Prosperity" to take their relationship to a higher level. "Our growing interaction with ASEAN is critical to fulfilling the promises of the 21st century being an Asian century," Singh said after annual talks with ASEAN leaders. "By building such bridges of understanding and interaction will we increase and widen the circles of prosperity and growth," he said. The pact covers a long-term plan committed to creating a free-trade area by 2011 with five ASEAN members -- Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore -- and by 2016 with the rest -- the Philippines, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam. Among a host of aims it seeks to improve financial stability, including through the development of an Asian bond market, and to promote the establishment of an ASEAN-India high-speed broadband optical fibre network. The leaders also pledged to deepen intelligence and information-sharing to expand anti-terror cooperation. Two-way trade between ASEAN and India is expected to more than double to reach 30 billion dollars by 2007, officials said. More than four decades after independence from Britain in 1947, India ditched its mantra of self-sufficiency and launched a "'Look East' drive. India, now an ASEAN summit partner along with China, Japan and South Korea, is pushing the creation of an Asian trading powerhouse to create an "arc of advantage" that could rival the European Union. mba-en/br/sm