India’s Commerce Department launches a dedicated cell to promote active use of free trade agreements, seeking to transform paper pacts into tangible economic gains and boost exports through strategic initiatives.
India’s Department of Commerce has created a new cell to push businesses to make better use of the country’s free trade agreements, as officials move to tackle a long-running problem of low uptake.
Commerce Secretary Rajesh Agrawal said the FTA Utilisation Cell will work with industry associations, export promotion councils and state governments to explain what the agreements offer and where the commercial opportunities lie. Speaking at the India-EFTA Prosperity Summit, he said many firms still need help understanding how to turn trade pacts into practical gains. The initiative is designed to move FTAs beyond government-to-government negotiation and into day-to-day business decisions, according to remarks reported by DD India and Devdiscourse.
Agrawal also said the department wants export promotion councils to draw up five-year action plans for each agreement, including steps to identify non-tariff barriers, quality requirements and potential anchor companies that could expand exports in overseas markets. He said India’s past experience with FTAs had not always been encouraging and that the real test of the new pacts would be whether they produced measurable trade growth. The secretary argued that businesses, manufacturers and farmers could only benefit if they actively used the agreements rather than leaving them as documents on paper.
The latest push comes as India has completed trade pacts with the European Free Trade Association, the United Arab Emirates, Australia, Mauritius, Oman, New Zealand and the UK, while talks continue with the European Union. Agrawal said the EFTA agreement should be seen in the wider context of India’s trade network, with the UK and EU deals together giving Indian companies access to 32 countries with mostly zero-tariff trade, according to the report in The Hindu BusinessLine.
He also stressed that the value of FTAs is not limited to lower duties. In his view, tariff certainty can help companies make investment decisions, build supply chains and plan for longer-term expansion. India’s share of imports from EFTA remains only about $2 billion to $3 billion, or less than 1% of the bloc’s roughly $500 billion in combined imports, Agrawal said. He suggested India should aim to raise that to around 2% over the next three to four years, a target that underlines how much room officials believe remains for exporters to grow if firms are better able to use the agreements.
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