India and UK are in the process of hammering out a free trade agreement (FTA) that could boost Britain’s trade by up to $36.5 billion annually by 2035. Speaking at the India Global Forum 2022, Britain’s Anne-Marie Trevelyan MP, Secretary of State for International Trade, Department for International Trade, talked about the importance of the India-UK deal and what she is most excited about for what is likely to be a “new era for UK-India trade relations”.
Hectic negotiations for the trade deal are already underway and Trevelyan says she expects her team to be ambitious and thinking in terms of long-term partnerships. India-UK expect the key framework to be out by Diwali. “October 24 is seared in my brain,” says the MP who is eager to see the India-UK FTA, which she describes as being at the “heart of my year of 5 top star FTAs”, on the table.
“It is imperative to have the framework together so that our businesses can crack on and make use of it and we can see our economies grow together, and together with other countries as well,” Tevelyan says. However, there is a process where lawyers are involved and they “scrub through” the legal language so that both sides – India and UK – will know what they have agreed on. She admist that perhaps this part may not be complete by the October deadline but the framework should be ready and make Diwali a happy one for both countries.
A key part of the FTA is people-to-people exchange and Trevelyan says that the UK businesses surely want to make use of these “brilliant young people with their fantastic education” who come from India to work in the country. Already, Trevelyan says, that the majority of the international talent in UK are Indians.
“The promising leadership of PM Modi, and the ‘living bridge’ that he talks about, and his genuine commitment of wanting India to be a part of the Global economic family, are all in good faith,” says the MP. “For us, it (the FTA) is a huge opportunity, huge market, a growing middle class, so from a traditional goods and services perspective, there are many opportunities for our businesses to find and take UK brands to India.”
The MP was in India in January this year where she along with Union Minister Piyush Goyal launched the FTA negotiations. She reflects on her visit to the JCB factory near New Delhi and upholds it as an example of India-UK business ties.
“Forty per cent of the JCB’s business is based in India and it uses these brilliant young engineers, and so many more women engineers than there are in JCB factories in the UK,” she notes.
Answering what about the FTA most excites her, Trevelyan said she would be more favourably biased to the cooperation that is being worked out on green energy. “At COP26 I was deeply involved in working out how technology and transformation could help us get ahead of the planetary destruction that we have caused. For me, green trade is one of the most important things we can do,” she says.
She further says that “the big opportunity” that this FTA “will give us is the chance for UK and India to work together in third countries where we can bring technological solutions and innovations and help them too.”
