NEW DELHI. Nov 10: As India and Pakistan reached the halfway mark Tuesday in a series of talks aimed at easing their rivalry, it became increasingly clear New Delhi was foundering in its attempt to turn the focus away from their Kashmir territorial dispute, reports AP.

Last week and Monday, the first three of six rounds of New Delhi talks — on water sharing, proposals for a cease-fire on a Kashmiri battleground known as the Siachan glacier, and a 30-year-old maritime boundary dispute — ended with little or no progress reported. Tuesday, commerce ministry officials from the two countries opened discussing on boosting trade.

Analysts like Bharat Karnad. a national security expert at New Delhi's independent Centre for Policy Research, says Tuesday's round on trade ties could yield results. Black market trade between India and Pakistan is already brisk. Karnad

said, estimating it at dlrs 3 billion a year, indicating that ordinary people in the two countries want close ties even if their governments are stalemated over Kashmir.

The Times of India reported Tuesday that official exports from Jndia to Pakistan and from Pakistan to India totalled about dlrs 161 million last year.

On Tuesday's agenda was a proposal for cash-strapped Pakistan to sell electricity to India: Indian demands that Pakistan reciprocate India's decision to grant mostfavoured-nation trade status to Pakistan: steps to improve movement of goods between the two countries by rail and to start bus service between the Indian capital and the Pakistani border city of Lahore.

The meetings wrap up on ter-' rorism and drug trafficking on Thursday and cultural ties on Friday.

India and Pakistan have

fought three wars since eacn gained independence from ritain in 1947. and continue to exchange shells and bullets almost daily across Kashmir, the Himalayan territory divided between them that both claim in its entirety. Their enmity reached new heights of tension in May when India tested nuclear weapons and Pakistan responded with its own tests.

Under international pressure following the nuclear talks, the two countries began peace talks on Kashmir last month in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad. The ongoing follow-up talks in New Delhi are a test of India's argument that progress can be made on lesser issues, improving the atmosphere to the point where progress also can be made on Kashmir.

But Pakistan says nothing can move forward without a Kashmir settlement, and that stance has overshadowed the New Delhi talks.