India should adopt an aggressive stance at the ongoing World Trade Organisation negotiations on services to eliminate existing barriers to its services exports and ensure that new ones are not imposed, a World Bank study has said.

"The current round of WTO negotiations offer India a remarkable opportunity to eliminate existing barriers to its services exports and prevent introduction of new ones," Aaditya Mattoo, lead economist and co-author of the World Bank report on 'Sustaining India's services revolution", has said.

According to Mattoo, the need for taking a more aggressive position has grown more urgent as outsourcing of operations to India has become a "political lighting rod", prompting demands for increased protectionism in North America and Europe.

The report, to be released next week, emphasises that in order to benefit from its services revolution, India must combine a more aggressive outward-looking negotiating stance at international trade talks with deeper reforms at home.

The report provides evidence that because of liberalisation, services such as information technology and telecommunications have attracted significant investment, grown faster and created more jobs than the protected sectors.

Foreign direct investment in services grew 36 per cent in 2001, almost twice the rate of growth in non-services FDI. Also, services related to information technology accounted for 34 per cent of India's services exports in 2001-02, it said.

According to the report, India must open up professional services such as accountancy, legal services and retail distribution to international competition and eliminate restrictions on trade in the financial and telecommunication sectors.