India Has Vast Scope To Expand In Global Value Chains Via FTAs: Commerce Secretary

Commerce secretary Rajesh Agarwal on Wednesday said that India has significant scope to expand its participation in global value chains (GVCs), with free trade agreements (FTAs) with developed economies offering opportunities to attract investment, increase domestic value addition and create jobs.

“India’s participation in global value chains had increased to around 37-38 percent from 28-29 per cent a decade ago as per the data sources. The department of commerce has set up a FTA utilisation cell to increase awareness among domestic industries about opportunities emerging from these pacts,” he said, while speaking at the India-EFTA TEPA Summit 2026 here.

“The idea behind that cell is: first, explain the FTA and the opportunities to every entrepreneur across the country through the industry associations, the export promotion councils (EPCs), the state government so that people understand what does a free trade agreement provides for and how these are new opportunities that businesses need to look at,” Agarwal said.

“Two, work with all the EPCs to see that we are able to improve FTA utilisation, we are able to have an action plan for each of the market with our partner country and we are able to work on it for next 4-5 years to actually see that this FTAs lead to actual integration of partner country market with Indian market,” he added.

In the recent past, India has finalised trade pacts with four-nation EFTA bloc, New Zealand, Mauritius, UAE, Australia, Oman, European Union (EU), and the UK. India-EFTA (European Free Trade Association) trade and economic partnership agreement (TEPA) was implemented in October last year. The EFTA members are Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and Switzerland.

“The EFTA pact should not be seen in isolation as India has finalised a trade pact with the 27-nation EU and the UK. So all together, we have got 32 countries in the region with which India will have a free trade arrangement wherein we will have the majority of our trade at zero tariffs. We have opened up our markets for them and they have opened up their markets for us” he said.

Meanwhile, he also said that trade agreements are not only about tariffs and tariff arbitrage. “The big ticket item in trade agreements is tariff predictability because for businesses. Now you know that for perpetuity or for the entire near future that you can see, the tariffs are going to remain stable and they are not going to throw any surprises in between. So you can take investment risks, you can build supply chains based on that and you can plan your future business growth based on that. That is the strength of this agreement,” he said.

For agriculture also, he also said, these are high consumption markets as they import agri goods worth over a trillion dollars. “If you are looking at a market of that size, I think there is a huge opportunity for us. The tariffs in agriculture have not gone down to zero in every sector but they have gone down to zero or there has been preferential access in many of the products where we do have strengths,” he added.