It has also sought to explain that the Indo-US agreement on QRs does not amount to "surrender" to US as alleged by the MPs.

As a signatory to the GATT agreement, India, the ministry clarifies, is obliged to fulfill its international commitments. In this regard, they clarify that the agreement was signed much before the present government came to power.

Senior commerce officials maintain that India had no alternative but to remove the remaining QRs as its appeal had been rejected by the WTO Appellate Body in the QR spat with the US.

Moreover, India's balance of payments position was quite satisfactory. The US had gone in appeal in the WTO stating that by maintaining QRs for BOP reasons, India had violated WTO rules.

Officials said that a perusal of the import data revealed that there had not been any surge in imports following the removal of QRs. In fact, the rate of growth of imports (in rupee terms) which stood at 36.40 per cent in 1995-96 came down to 13.2 per cent in 1996-97 and to 11 per cent in 1997-98. In the following two years, imports grew by 14.2 per cent in 1998-99 and 14.9 per cent in 1999-2000.(See table).

They referred to the recent statement of commerce and industry minister Murasoli Maran who had said that "we have sufficient weapons in our armoury and will utilise them of dumping, cartelisation etc resulted in causing injury to the domestic industry".

He had also stated that the government would not hesitate to resort to measures ordained by WTO to protect the domestic industry from cheap imports of consumers goods including luxury items in the wake of lifting of QRs on 714 tariff lines from April 1 this year.

The government had lifted QRs earlier as well. At the time of the initial announcement of tariff line-wise imports policy on April 1, 1996, out of 10,202 tariff lines, 6.161 lines were already free. Thereafter, during 1996-97 and 1997-98 and 1998-99, QRs were removed on 488, 391 and 894 tariff lines respectively.

It was therefore evident that over the years QRs had been removed progressively in line with India's international commitments and the policy of economic liberalisation. This had primarily been possible due to improvements in the balance of payments position since 1991. QRs in respect of all tariff lines, barring a few items, which were canalised had been withdrawn for imports from SAARC countries from August 1, 1988.