Unlike the previous Uruguay Round of WTO negotiations when it overlooked small details and "played into the US tricks", India will minutely examine the Doha trade deal blueprint that may emerge from parleys in the next few weeks.

"We are going to hire 80 economic graduates and computer programmers who will verify clause-by-clause all the schedules and attachments to the main agreement and find whether there is a devil in detail," a senior Commerce Ministry official said.

The World Trade Organisation is likely to issue on Monday fresh proposals on agriculture, the most contentious area in the Doha Round, launched in the Qatar capital in 2001.

The official, associated with the talks in Geneva, said Indian negotiators should be ready, well in advance, if a deal is struck on the modalities (blueprint). In the next stage, members would make commitments for duty cuts item by item.

"We need to examine it in detail even though it is a voluminous exercise requiring an eagle's eye," he said.

The US had circumvented its subsidy commitment by a huge value by inserting an obscure asterisk in the final text of the Uruguay Round agreement, he said.

In 1995, when the Uruguay Round concluded, the US had agreed to reduce its farm subsidies by 20 per cent. Going by its 10-billion-dollar subsidy in 1995, United States' total farm dole-outs should have come down to eight billion dollars in the implementation period that ended in 2000.

"But its subsidy bill even in 2004-05 was $23 billion," the official said, adding the trick was that base years for determining the reduction by 20 per cent were set at 1986-1988 when American farmers received sops worth a mammoth 50 billion dollars.

"Setting of the base year was buried in the footnotes and not many looked at the asterisk in the main text," the official said.

Narrowing of differences among developed and developing countries on farm subsidies and market access in the past few months has raised hopes of completing the trade talks by the end of 2008.

While India has maintained that the issues of livelihood security and marginal farmers are "non-tradeable", it is likely to "play ball" if a protection level from imports -equivalent to 15 per cent of the agricultural tariff lines -- is provided to the country.

India's farm crops and products add up to 715 tariff lines and the country would need to protect its farmers by saying 'no' to duty cuts on at least 100 lines.