Press Release

31 July 2025, New Delhi: The India-UK Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) was signed on 24 July 2025 by the Governments of India and the UK. Government press releases and media reports have advertised the major opportunities within the CETA. However, the Forum for Trade Justice —a group of 100 civil society organisations and trade policy researchers—are seriously concerned about the concessions made by India that mark a significant shift from all previously signed Free Trade Agreements.

These concessions will massively impact India’s ability to design and implement policies to meet public health objectives; generate and sustain equitable economic development; and secure decent livelihoods. In sum, it represents a lopsided agreement that compromises heavily on policy tools to attain sustainable development objectives while the promised gains are insignificant and unrealistic. Moreover, the CETA will propel India towards further concessions in its future trade engagements.

Undermining TRIPS flexibilities in Intellectual property rights and access to medicines: “The CETA contains intellectual property provisions that favour pharmaceutical corporations at the expense of public health. It prioritizes voluntary licensing over compulsory licensing—a clear dilution of the TRIPS Flexibilities and the Doha Declaration on TRIPS and Public Health 2001 that India had continuously upheld. This severely limits access to affordable medicines. Further, the CETA reduces transparency by requiring patent holders to disclose the status of working of patents only once every three years and keeping critical information confidential, making it harder for applicants to prove their case for issuing compulsory licenses and challenge monopolies. Additionally, it pushes for patent harmonization with developed countries, potentially allowing ‘evergreening’ of patents and weakening India’s current safeguards. These changes threaten the constitutional right to health by prioritizing corporate interests over public access to essential medicines. Further, India’s stand in multilateral forums like the WTO and the UNFCCC —making technology transfer mandatory— is diluted, as the CETA supports voluntary technology transfer and on mutually agreed terms”, said Biswajit Dhar, former professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi.

Weakened development policy in digital economy and heavily compromised data sovereignty: “The CETA’s e-commerce chapter marks a stunning shift”, said Sadhana Sanjay, Lead, Research & Policy Engagement, IT for Change, “for the first time, India surrenders its right to ask for source code in its digital imports, which is extremely important for regulatory and law enforcement needs. Importantly, this prohibition applies to all software, and not only to mass-market software. Unregulated development of AI systems can pose significant dangers, which may range from replicating and exacerbating discrimination or biases to expropriating and misusing confidential data provision”.

Further, Parminder Jeet Singh, independent digital society researcher, points out, “For the first time India has conceded that its national data, as may be held by government, is not a national resource, but an international free for all. Under the CETA, this data should be made available through public access to ‘interested stakeholders’. Parties are also prohibited from restricting the reproduction, redistribution, republishing of this data, or using it for commercial or non-commercial purposes. Data is a valuable resource in the digital age, and its access is linked with economic competitiveness but also has security implications. This provision violates the principles of resource sovereignty under international law and represents an extra-ordinary surrender of the key national resource of its data”.

The CETA also seeks to ensure that electronically authenticated transactions/contracts have the same legal validity as those on paper. Crucially, the provision restricts governments from regulating authentication measures for electronic transactions between private parties. In effect, this curtails the government’s regulatory capacity in the security, verification, and transparency of electronic contracts and transactions.

Finally, while India has stood firm on data flows and data location, if it accepts any such provisions/disciplines with any other country, it will then “enter into consultations to extend appropriate equivalent disciplines under this Agreement to those agreed with the non-party addressing”. This MFN provision bespeaks a dangerous regress for India’s long-held position on data flows and localization.

Government procurement market is no longer a development policy tool: The central government procurement market, which is a major development policy tool to support domestic industry— particularly MSMEs and village industries employing marginalized communities— “has been almost fully liberalized under the CETA by agreeing to provide non-discriminatory treatment to the UK in central government procurement,” said Prof. Abhijit Das, independent trade policy expert and the former Head of the Centre for WTO Studies, New Delhi and that “even in procurements to be made under “Make In India” Order, UK suppliers will be treated at par with Class 2 Indian suppliers, eventually undermining Atma Nirbhar Bharat and Make in India flagship programmes. In contrast, the UK government’s annual procurement from sources outside its territory has historically been very low, estimated to be less that GBP 10 bn, suggesting that Indian exporters are unlikely to make any substantial export gains in the UK government procurement market”.

Key goods sectors opened but weak expectations for additional exports due to non-tariff barriers:  In goods, India has indeed managed to protect some critical sectors especially in agriculture and dairy including many cereals and key products in the fruits and vegetables segment. But the auto industry— one of the successful sectors in India that creates about 37 million jobs— is likely to take a hit from the tariff cuts. Even if the cuts are staggered over 15 years, the initial year will see a significant tariff cut from 110 per cent to 30 per cent and from 66 per cent to 50 per cent in the different segments. Similarly, whisky producers, a growing agro-processing industry with tremendous potential, will see a tariff cut from 150 per cent to 75 per cent which will then drop to 40 per cent in 10 years. The future growth and employment generation in both these industries will face a massive setback as a result.

Several reports project massive gains both in agriculture and industrial products exports due to UK’s elimination of tariffs on 99 per cent of goods exported from India to the UK. However, Ranja Sengupta, trade researcher with TWN Trust India, said that “India’s inability to address non-tariff barriers in the UK implies that much of this projected gain is illusory at best. In the agriculture sector, the NTBs including the automatic recognition of UK’s Geographical Indications (GI) will severely impact the prospect of Indian dairy industry and the Indian alcoholic beverage industry. Moreover, UK’s recently introduced Carbon Border Adjustment Tax, which India failed to eliminate, will also compromise the export market for Indian products into the UK”.

Locking in liberalisation of financial services now while benefits left to the future:  In services, the UK’s gains pose a challenge to policy flexibility for India. For instance, India has supposedly capped the liberalisation in key financial services such as in banking and insurance at current levels, assuring future certainty for UK businesses. However, this prevents any future roll back of caps, even if necessary from a security point of view. Further, the much-publicized Double Contributions Convention (DCC) which is supposed to confer significant benefits to Indian workers in the UK, is not yet concluded and therefore its benefits remain unknown and uncertain.

Labour, Environment and Gender: A door held ajar: By agreeing to the developed country template on non-trade issue— like labour, environment and gender— India’s commitments at international platforms, as well as its implementation of domestic laws and regulations on these issues, will be subject to scrutiny by the UK through committees under the CETA. These provisions open the door for more onerous and legally enforceable commitments in future trade agreements, including a possible imposition of trade sanctions for non-compliance.

Where are the gains?: The failure to make real gains while making massive concessions on development policy tools is glaringly obvious. Dinesh Abrol, former professor at the Institute for Studies in Industrial Development, points out that “according to the impact assessment conducted by the UK Department of Business and Trade, as a result of the CETA, India is projected to gain just about 3.7 billion GBP in exports annually between 2025 and 2040 whereas the UK will gain 1.5 times more. India’s projected annual export gain from the CETA amounts to a measly 0.44 per cent of its current annual exports. For this puny gain, India seems to have unnecessarily conceded massive policy space in key areas”.

Severe jolt to India’s trade policy positioning across current and future trade engagements: According to the Forum for Trade Justice, these concessions also jeopardize India’s negotiating position in the World Trade Organisation and in all its past and future FTAs. India’s long-term efforts to protect public health from the damaging provisions of the TRIPS Agreement and to uphold the full use of TRIPS flexibilities will be heavily undermined. Its strong stance in the WTO and in FTAs on source code availability, open access to government data and electronic transactions, is all but unraveled. It’s cautious approach to government procurement liberalisation in the Government Procurement Agreement (GPA) of the WTO and in its FTAs is almost eliminated. It is important to remember that there will be massive demands from developed countries to agree to the same concessions at the WTO or in other FTAs. The EU has already indicated that it expects the same or higher concessions accorded to partners such as the US or UK.

Further, the CETA is pitched in expert circles as a counter to the US’s dominance over India’s trade and is supposed to grant India some bargaining chips with the US. In effect, it is more likely to help the US attain some of its aggressive demands, which will get facilitated rather than blocked by the UK agreement.

Finally, the negotiations were conducted with limited involvement of broader civil society.  Shalini Bhutani, independent legal expert and trade policy analyst said that “the CETA will come into force only after due completion of UK parliamentary procedure. UK’s Constitutional Reform and Governance (CRaG) Act warrants proper pre-ratification scrutiny of any FTA. Likewise, there ought to be discussions on this CETA in the Indian Parliament. This ought to be the norm in a parliamentary democracy“.

The Forum for Trade Justice rejects this CETA and urges the Government of India to seriously assess the policy space it has conceded. It is urgent that the government recalibrates its trade policy stance at this critical juncture. Otherwise, the lives and livelihoods of the Indian people will be in serious jeopardy.

 

For more information, contact:

Ranja Sengupta, [email protected]

Parminder Jeet Singh, [email protected]

Angshuman Sarma, [email protected]