India and Russia will set up a joint task force (JTF) to boost bilateral trade to a level of $10 billion by 2010 from the present $2 billion, a senior official of the Indian government has said. The JTF would be set up by the end of this year when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh visits Moscow for summit talks with President Vladimir Putin, Commerce Secretary G.K. Pillai was quoted as saying by the Press Trust of India at a meeting of Joint Study Group (JSG) on economic cooperation in Moscow. The JSG was instituted to identify the bottlenecks in tapping the potential of bilateral economic cooperation and trade. According to Pillai, the proposed task force would monitor implementations of recommendations, covering goods, services and investments, as given in a 150-page-report prepared by the JSG. JTF would be a time-bound mechanism with the final goal of signing comprehensive economic cooperation agreement (CECA) and free trade agreement (FTA) with Russia, once it joins WTO, Pillai told reporters.
