India aims to wrap up EU FTA by early 2026, says Commerce Secretary Rajesh Agarwal

European commissioner for trade and economic security Maroš Šefčovič commerce minister Piyush Goyal after their meeting in Brussels on May 1.

India aims to wrap up its free trade agreement with the European Union by early 2026, Commerce Secretary Rajesh Agarwal said on November 28, as talks enter their final phase.

"India-EU FTA is one of the most difficult and big FTA that we are negotiating. And over the last three year lot of work has been done and I can say we are in the last phase of negotiations, which normally are the most arduous and most difficult," Agarwal said at an event in New Delhi.

Agarwal said the final phase of negotiations effectively begun over the past two to three months, with regular engagement at all levels, including ministerial.

"There is energy on both sides trying to work out a deal as soon as possible. We are in a good zone, we are trying to do it in the next few months, but we won't put a hard deadline to it because we know at the end it is the quality of the deal that will matter not the timing of the deal. So we will go for the quality while still working on the timing," he added.

India and the European Union had targeted concluding their FTA negotiations by the end of 2025. Both sides have narrowed differences in key areas, particularly following a visit by an EU negotiating team to New Delhi from November 3 to 7 to discuss the proposed agreement. During the talks, the parties agreed to further accelerate efforts toward a balanced trade pact.

In February 2025, India and the EU decided to ramp up talks for the proposed free trade agreement, targeting to close it by the end of 2025 to tide over ongoing disruptions from volatile trade policies.

The EU is India's largest trading partner, accounting for 12.2 percent of its trade, ahead of the US (10.8 percent) and China (10.5 percent). The bloc is the second-largest destination for Indian exports after the United States.

India is the EU’s ninth-largest trading partner, accounting for 2.2 percent of its trade in goods in 2023, well behind the US, China and the UK.