AUTHORS : HARSH V. PANT | SHAIREE MALHOTRA

Originally Published NDTV 

Published on Jul 26, 2025

On July 24, India and the UK signed a Free Trade Agreement (FTA), officially referred to as the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), wrapping up over three years of negotiations and fourteen rounds that began at the start of 2022. After several British Prime Ministers and missed deadlines, the agreement, which was concluded in May this year, has finally come to see the light of day.

As the UK's 11th largest trading partner, India currently accounts for a little over 2% of the UK's total trade, but holds a trade surplus of approximately 8.4 billion pounds with the UK. The CETA is estimated to double bilateral trade from the current 42 billion pounds.

Signed, Sealed, Delivered

For full article, please open the link:

https://www.orfonline.org/research/uk-and-india-finally-shed-the-baggage-of-history

IRSEA AND ORF ARE PARTNERS.

Professor Harsh V. Pant is Honorary Member of the Romanian Institute for Europe-Asia Studies – IRSEA.

The opinions expressed in this article are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect the official policy, position or view of IRSEA

*Professor Harsh V. Pant is Vice President – Studies and Foreign Policy at Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi. He is a Professor of International Relations with King's India Institute at King’s College London. He is also Director (Honorary) of Delhi School of Transnational Affairs at Delhi University. Professor Pant has been a Visiting Professor at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore; a Visiting Professor at Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi; a Visiting Fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania; a Visiting Scholar at the Center for International Peace and Security Studies, McGill University; a Non-Resident Fellow with the Wadhwani Chair in US-India Policy Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, DC; and an Emerging Leaders Fellow at the Australia-India Institute, University of Melbourne. Professor Pant's current research is focused on Asian security issues. His most recent books include India and Global Governance: A Rising Power and Its Discontents (Routledge), Politics and Geopolitics: Decoding India’s Neighbourhood Challenge (Rupa), America and the Indo-Pacific: Trump and Beyond (Routledge), New Directions in India’s Foreign Policy: Theory and Praxis (Cambridge University Press), India’s Nuclear Policy (Oxford University Press), The US Pivot and Indian Foreign Policy (Palgrave Macmillan), Handbook of Indian Defence Policy (Routledge), and India’s Afghan Muddle (HarperCollins). Professor Pant writes regularly for various Indian and international media outlets including the Japan Times, the Wall Street Journal, the National (UAE), the Hindustan Times, and the Telegraph