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India rebukes world's rich for setting unfair economic rules

India on Monday rebuked the world's rich countries for setting the rules for a global free-market economy that created an uneven playing field for developing nations.

"We are increasingly exposed to pressures to conform to an agenda defined by others," Indian Vice-President Krishna Kant told the Cairo summit of G15 group of developing nations.

"There is no call for people on the hills to lay down all the rules for the people in the valley," he said.

"Reform should give local communities and national governments the capacity to meet the needs of the people as much as the needs of the market," Kant said.

Although developing countries generally support being integrated into the free-market economy, their concerns are being ignored in several areas, he added.

Kant urged the multinationals to meet their investment obligations, apparently referring to their decision to withdraw capital from countries when they face economic problems.

He also called for the West to ease its "intrusive" demands on human rights, labor standards and intellectual property as well as its calls to link grant aid to the opening of markets.

"When we talk of intellectual property, only the rights of the private property holder are sought to be protected," he said.

He added: "Our sovereign right over our biological resources is not acknowledged, nor the use of our traditional knowledge readily paid for.

"We have these and several other matters where our rights and interests have to be guaranteed," he said.

"In Seattle, industrialised nations attempted to push through their recipes and to impose linkage of trade with labor and environmental standards," he said. "Such conditions are unacceptable to us."

The World Trade Organisation, or WTO, conference in Seattle in December failed, amid mass public protests, over differences among the United States, Europe and developing nations over the substance of a new round of trade liberalisation.

In short, Kant said, "We need favorable treatment until we reach a development level that enables us to take on the obligations of the global economy."

The G15 summit here is taking place a month before the summit in Japan of the G8 group of the world's richest countries -- the United States, Europe, Russia and Japan.

Japanese leaders have said they would call on their G8 colleagues to draw up a major aid package to bridge the "digital divide" threatening to leave the world's poor further behind.