Trade negotiators from India and 10-nation Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) will meet in Jakarta on Monday, just days ahead of a ministerial meet to advance the review of their goods trade agreement.
The work on the review of the Asean-India Trade in Goods Agreement has progressed well, but there’s still some distance to be covered for an announcement to be made at the 22nd Asean India Summit to be held in Kuala Lumpur on October 27.
After the 11th round of talks for the review that will be held on October 6 and October 7, the leaders at the summit will be apprised of the progress in discussions and seek their directions on the forward movement. Both sides are engaging in the review to complete the process by the end of this year.
“There are still discussions that are going on. There has been some progress seen in the last 3-4 months. The effort from the Asean side is to see that there are significant things to report by the time the summit takes place. We will not be able to close the review because the talks are not at that stage. Mauve some important decisions will be taken that will add to the positivity,” a senior official said.
The 10th round of talks for the review were held from August 10 to August 14 in New Delhi.
Progress made across eight technical sub-committees
The review process is being led by a joint committee which has eight sub-committees under it, each dealing with a particular subject.
There are sub-Committee on Customs Procedures and Trade Facilitation (SC-CPTF), Legal and Institutional Issues (SC-LII), National Treatment and Market Access (SC-NTMA), Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SC-SPS) and Rules of Origin (SC-ROO). There is also a sub-committee on standards, technical regulations and conformity assessment Procedures (SC-STRACAP), and trade remedies (SC-TR).
India’s push to rebalance the decade-old trade pact
Within five years of the agreement on goods trade getting 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. However, with the deadline nearing and every country facing uncertainty due to the actions of the US President Donald Trump both sides might speed up the pace of talks to get the review out of the way.
The ASEAN – that includes Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam – remains a key trade partner for India, accounting for around 11% of India’s global trade. Bilateral trade reached $ 123 billion in 2024–25. Of the total, India’s exports during the year stood at just $38.96 billion while imports were $ 84.15 billion.