A top State Department official said on Monday that US is currently working on an India-specific export control regime which is expected to be announced before the November visit of US President Barack Obama to India.

Though the administration is aiming for a wider review of the entire export control regime, the Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia Robert Blake confirmed that a India-specific review is under process.

"We have made a great deal of progress over the last six years or so in reducing the export controls that apply to India. Now less than one-half of 1 per cent of all exports requires any sort of a license at all," he said.

In spite of a lot of progress, there are still some controls that are needed to be relaxed provided Indians do the necessary to strengthen their own export control regime. Thus Blake has been found saying There's been a lot of progress, but there still are some controls. So there's a reciprocal process under way to seek the necessary assurances from the Indians about the strengthening of their own export control regime that would enable us to relax our restrictions." He even expects some good progress on the issue in the coming future.

"We had a good exchange during the strategic dialogue in which we shared ideas about how we can achieve that good progress. So I expect that there will be some positive announcements to be made before the president's visit, hopefully well before," he said.

He informed that the US is keeping a close watch at the entities list. "And many entities have already come off it over the last several years. But now there's a focus on entities like ISRO and DRDO -- the Indian Space Research Organization, the Defense Research and Development Organization," he said.

The US government is also hopeful about the cooperation that can benefit both the countries. "So again, we think that there are enormous opportunities for American companies to do more and work more with their colleagues in the space area and also in the defense area. So these are steps that would serve both our countries. We shared ideas about how we could make progress on that. And we to see progress on that in the fairly near future," Blake said.