Despite patchy progress, the review of the goods trade agreement between India and Asean is expected to reach some kind of a conclusion by October this year, a senior official said Tuesday.
Between now and October two rounds of physical negotiations are likely to take place. The first meeting might be held in August in New Delhi and the second could be in Malaysia in October.
“So we hope that in these two rounds we should be able to make good progress and try to have some kind of conclusion when the Asean-India summit takes place in October-end. The endeavour is towards that direction, let’s see how much we can achieve,” special secretary in the Department of Commerce Rajesh Agrawal said.
Both sides are aiming at concluding the review by the end of 2025.
He said that the progress of the review talks have been chequered.
“It is not like what we could have been liked but the good part is that we are moving on many aspects specially on customs and trade facilitation, we are moving on technical cooperation , some improvement in Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) and Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT) collaborations. There are discussions around market access,” he added.
Asean India Trade in Goods Agreement (AITIGA) came into force in 2010. Within five years of the agreement on goods being activated in 2010 India had started asking for a review of the pact as its imports from Asean zoomed but it could not derive the expected benefits. It took India four years to bring Asean around to the need of review of the AITIGA. “Asean agreed to review in November 2019 and for two years did not start negotiating on it. Even after a number of rounds of review negotiations the progress has been very limited,” an official had said earlier
In the AITIGA while India slashed duties up 71% of its traded products. Indonesia brought tariffs down on just 41 % of the products, Vietnam 66.5% and Thailand 67%. These countries had higher per capita income than India but even then in the AITIGA New Delhi agreed to more concessions than the Asean members. This non-reciprocity is another reason that Asean has walked away with most of the gains from the agreement.
Asean includes Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam.
Recently commerce and industry minister Piyush Goyal had said that it was “silly” on India’s part to sign an FTA with Asean which is now being used to route Chinese products into India.
Since AITIGA became operational, the trade deficit with Asean widened from $ 4.98 billion in 2010-11, the first full year of operation of AITIGA to $ 44.20 billion in 2024-25. India’s exports to the region fell 5.77% on year in 2024-25 to $ 38.96 billion while imports grew 5.65% to $ 84.16 billion.
