Dr Murali Kallummal is Professor at the Centre for WTO Studies (CRIT, Indian Institute of Foreign Trade), a Think Tank which provides negotiating input to the Department of Commerce. He has a PhD specialising in Industrial Economics from JNU. His PhD thesis was on the capital market based corporate financing patterns of India’s corporate sector.
He has more than 20 years of experience in the areas of trade and development issues; domestic and international finance; market access issues in agricultural and manufacturing sectors; standards, [sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS)-based measures, technical barriers to trade (TBT), private standards]; and trade & environment. Dr Kallummal has remained concerned over the developmental impact of trade policy and backs his findings with considerable empirical research on trade agreements and India’s WTO commitments. He has conceived and maintains an official web portal with two databases on non-tariff measures (NTMs). [SPS database < http://cc.iift.ac.in/sps/index.asp> and TBT database < http://cc.iift.ac.in/tbt/index.asp>]. The database is unique in that it provides trade linkage at HS 4 digits level for all the SPS and TBT notifications made to the WTO by 164 countries.
The Government of India has nominated Dr Kallummal to WTO’s official training programmes and taken specialised lectures on market access issues. He has conducted training and lectures in countries like Niger, Mongolia, Myanmar and Nepal. He was also a member of the official Indian delegation for regional trade agreement (RTA) negotiations. Kallummal has been interacting with several institutions, domestically and internationally, on developmental challenges emerging from the negotiations under the WTO and RTAs. He has been working closely with several intergovernmental organisations like ARTnet (UNESCAP), Commonwealth Secretariat, ITC, the EU, etc. Kallummal has been instrumental in identifying trade barriers and has been an external consultant to the ADB SASEC Workshops on trade facilitation (SPS and TBT Project). He was also an integral part of two-year training modules for guiding Afghanistan’s negotiators, chamber of commerce, academia and industry persons to comply with their accession challenges to the WTO.
He has to his credit couple of books, contributions in edited books and several peer-reviewed research papers in Indian and international journals. Dr Kallummal is a co-director in the ICSSR Project entitled ‘Global Value chain Engagement and Industrial Restructuring: A Study of the Indian Electronics Industry’ funded by the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR), Government of India.
