A position paper presented by India at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) has been accepted as the basis on which member countries will hold multilateral talks on services that have made little headway so far.

Commerce Minister Kamal Nath presented the paper, which seeks a fresh momentum to the talks on services, at a meeting of a core group in Geneva Thursday that he co-chaired with US Trade Representative Robert Portman, officials here said.

India's paper aims to provide a structure and focus to the issues that require decision at the Ministerial Conference of WTO in Hong Kong in December to achieve a balanced package at the end of the current round of trade talks.

Member countries agreed to India's suggestion that any complementary approach during the talks must supplement and not replace the existing system of making "requests and offers" that also needs to be simultaneously intensified.

The system, they felt, must also preserve the basic architecture of the General Agreement on Trade in Services and the flexibility it provides particularly for developing country members.

As regards the least developed countries, while its members should participate in the deliberations the targets that may be agreed should not be applicable to them.

They also agreed that the focus of any approach should be on improving the existing commitments and taking into account the obligations of new WTO member at the time of their accession to the multilateral trade body.

There was also recognition in the paper and in the discussions that followed that the services package would have to include domestic regulations and that a clear direction was needed for developing a sound basis for legal matters.

India has a special interest in services in view of its strengths in the sector and the core ministerial group on services of WTO was recently constituted as a result of the initiative taken by the Indian negotiators, officials said.

According to information reaching here, the core group, comprising ministers and senior officials of 15 countries, met in Geneva Oct 12 to consider concrete ways of imparting specificity and momentum to the services negotiations.

Besides India, the countries represented at the meeting were Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Egypt, India, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, Singapore and the US besides the European Commission.