India's FTA network reaches nine pacts across 38 countries

A year-end stocktake of the free-trade agreements India has signed, implemented or announced through 2025-26 — and the countries each one opens.

What happened

• The Ministry of Commerce and Industry put out a 2025-26 review of India's free-trade agreements, totting up the network at nine FTAs spanning 38 countries.
• The review chains the deals in sequence — from the early India-Mauritius pact of 2021 through to the India-EU agreement of 27 January 2026 — to show how fast the map has filled in over five years.
• It records that the India-EFTA TEPA, signed on 10 March 2024, finally entered into force on 1 October 2025, making it the live event of the year rather than a fresh signature.
• Two more deals were closed in late 2025 — the India-Oman CEPA (December 2025) and the India-New Zealand FTA (announced 22 December 2025).
• Separately, with the United States a framework for an interim agreement was reported delivered on 7 February 2026 — described as a framework, not a concluded FTA.
• Across the negotiations, the review states that sensitive sectors — dairy, agriculture, farmers and domestic industry — were protected.

Background and context

A Free Trade Agreement (FTA) is a treaty between two or more countries that cuts or removes customs duties and eases non-tariff barriers on goods traded between them, usually alongside commitments on services, investment and rules of origin. India's newer agreements increasingly carry richer titles than the plain "FTA" label, and the difference is examinable. A CEPA (Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement) and a CECA (Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Agreement) go beyond goods to bind services, investment and economic cooperation; a CETA (Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement) and a TEPA (Trade and Economic Partnership Agreement) are the names India used for the UK and EFTA deals respectively; an ECTA / ECA (Economic Cooperation and Trade Agreement) such as the one with Australia is typically an "early harvest" or interim arrangement that a fuller CECA is meant to follow. All of these are FTAs in substance; the labels signal how broad the coverage is.

India's trade-agreement push sits inside the wider Foreign Trade Policy and is steered by the Department of Commerce within the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, the nodal body that negotiates and notifies these treaties. The 2025-26 burst marks a clear shift from India's earlier caution. After walking out of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) in November 2019 — a 15-nation Asia-Pacific bloc India declined to join over fears of a flood of Chinese imports and an unprotected dairy sector — New Delhi pivoted to a string of bilateral and pluri-lateral deals where it could ring-fence its sensitive sectors. The UAE CEPA in 2022 was the first of this new wave, and the agreements since then form the family this review counts.

The single biggest milestone of the year under review is procedural rather than a new signing: the India-EFTA TEPA crossing from "signed" (10 March 2024) to "in force" (1 October 2025). It carries a headline pledge of USD 100 billion of investment into India over 15 years from the EFTA bloc, tied to job-creation targets — an investment-linked design unusual for an Indian trade pact and a likely prelims-and-mains hook.

It helps to read the deals individually, because UPSC questions tend to pin a single agreement to a single detail. The India-UAE CEPA (in force May 2022) was India's first trade pact with a West Asian nation and is credited with a sharp jump in bilateral merchandise trade; it also gave preferential access to gems, jewellery and textiles. The India-Australia ECTA is an "early harvest" deal — a slimmer, interim agreement implemented in December 2022, with a fuller Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Agreement (CECA) intended to follow. The India-UK CETA, signed in July 2025 after years of negotiation, is notable for its Double Contribution Convention sparing Indian workers in the UK from paying social-security contributions in both countries for a set period — a mobility win as much as a tariff one. The India-Oman CEPA extended the Gulf push begun with the UAE. The India-EU FTA of 27 January 2026 is the most ambitious of the set, opening a single market of 27 member states. Read together, the family shows India sequencing from smaller, lower-risk partners toward its largest and most demanding trading blocs.

For Prelims

• Headline tally: Nine FTAs across 38 countries, as stated in this 2025-26 review.
• Nodal body: Department of Commerce, Ministry of Commerce and Industry — the negotiator and notifier of India's trade agreements.
• The sequence (chronological): India-Mauritius (2021) → India-UAE CEPA (May 2022) → India-Australia ECTA (implemented December 2022) → India-EFTA TEPA (signed 10 March 2024, in force 1 October 2025) → India-UK CETA (signed July 2025) → India-Oman CEPA (December 2025) → India-New Zealand FTA (announced 22 December 2025) → India-EU FTA (27 January 2026).
• United States: only a framework for an interim agreement (7 February 2026) — not counted as a concluded FTA.
• EFTA is not the EU: the European Free Trade Association has exactly four members — Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland — none of which is in the European Union. The India-EFTA TEPA and the India-EU FTA are two separate agreements with two separate sets of countries.
• The Mauritius CECPA (2021) was India's first trade agreement with an African country.
• Protected sectors: dairy, agriculture, farmers and domestic industry are stated as ring-fenced across these deals.

The full set — match the agreement to its name and partner(s):

What it is NOT: An FTA is not a customs union (members of an FTA keep their own separate external tariffs against non-members; a customs union shares a common external tariff). It is not a common market (no free movement of labour or capital is implied). The EFTA TEPA is not an EU agreement — confusing the four EFTA states with the EU's 27 is the single most common trap here. The US "framework" is not a signed FTA, so it does not add to the nine. And these agreements are not negotiated through the WTO; they are bilateral or pluri-lateral treaties that sit alongside India's multilateral WTO commitments.

Why it matters

For an economy that long approached trade liberalisation warily, nine agreements in five years signals a deliberate strategy: lock in preferential market access for India's labour-intensive exports — textiles, gems and jewellery, leather, pharmaceuticals, engineering goods — into high-value markets like the UK, the EU and the EFTA bloc, while shielding the politically sensitive farm and dairy economy. The deals also serve a geo-strategic purpose. With the China-anchored RCEP declined, this network lets India deepen economic ties with Western and Gulf partners and diversify supply chains away from a single dominant source. The EFTA TEPA's USD 100 billion investment commitment, and the services and mobility chapters in the UK and EU talks, point to the second-generation goal: not just selling more goods, but attracting investment and winning professional-mobility access for Indian workers abroad. The repeated stress on protecting dairy, agriculture and small domestic industry reflects the domestic political constraint that shaped every one of these negotiations and that explains why the US framework remains short of a full agreement.

A useful comparison is with the agreement India did not join. RCEP would have bound India into a single tariff-cutting bloc with China, the ten ASEAN states, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand; New Delhi withdrew in 2019 over an unfavourable trade balance with China and inadequate safeguards for farmers and small manufacturers. The 2025-26 network is the strategic answer to that decision — instead of one large multilateral pact dominated by a rival economy, India built a chain of bilateral deals it could shape one partner at a time, each with sensitive sectors carved out. That same logic explains why an FTA with the United States, India's largest single export market, has produced only a framework so far: the hardest bargaining is precisely over the dairy and agricultural access that India has consistently refused to open.

For Mains

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