On July 15, 2026, the India-United Kingdom Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) entered into force. Signed in London on July 24, 2025, by Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal and his UK counterpart, in the presence of Prime Ministers Narendra Modi and Keir Starmer, the agreement is the product of 14 negotiating rounds spanning roughly three years, since talks were formally launched in January 2022.
It is, by common description, India’s most comprehensive trade agreement with a G-7 economy, and the UK’s most significant bilateral trade pact since leaving the European Union. For a state like Goa, small in scale but disproportionately export-oriented in pharmaceuticals, seafood and beverages, the timing invites serious, sober analysis rather than celebratory rhetoric.
India-UK commercial ties have historically underperformed their political warmth. The ‘Enhanced Trade Partnership’ of May 2021 and the subsequent India-UK Roadmap 2030 set an explicit target: doubling bilateral trade to $100 billion by 2030. Progress toward that goal has been real but modest. Even at the global level, the disproportion is striking: The UK imported goods worth $928.9 billion in 2025, yet India supplied only about $15.2 billion, roughly 1.6%. The UK, in turn, accounted for just 3.4% of India’s $445 billion global merchandise exports. This is the structural problem CETA is designed to correct: not a broken relationship, but an underexploited one.
Total India-UK trade in goods stood at $25.12 billion in 2025-26, up 8.62% from $23.13 billion the previous year. The composition of that growth, however, is worth scrutiny rather than applause. India’s exports to the UK actually fell 7.6% to $13.44 billion, while imports from the UK surged 36.11% to $11.68 billion, aided by roughly $1 billion in UK foreign direct investment into India during the year. In other words, the pre-CETA trend already favoured the UK side of the ledger.
The tariff architecture agreed is asymmetric in speed, if not in coverage. The UK will remove duties on 99% of Indian tariff lines immediately, eliminating tariffs of up to 70% on processed foods, 21.5% on marine products, 18% on engineering goods and auto components, 16% on leather and footwear, 12% on textiles and 8% on chemicals and pharmaceuticals.
India, by contrast, has opened only 89.5% of its tariff lines, with just 24.5% receiving immediate duty-free treatment; the rest phase in over five, seven or ten years, largely to protect sectors under Production-Linked Incentive schemes. India has kept dairy, cereals, millets, pulses, edible oils, apples, gold, jewellery, and smartphones outside the deal entirely.
A companion Double Contribution Convention, signed in February 2026, exempts Indian professionals on UK assignments from paying social security twice, extending the exemption window from three to five years. This is expected to benefit over 75,000 professionals across more than 900 companies.
Three trends merit honest attention. First, India’s steel exports to the UK, about $900 million in FY2026, roughly 7% of total goods exports there, face fresh pressure from tightened British steel-import measures effective July 1, 2026, though negotiators have secured quota-based protections covering the bulk of current trade.
Second, the UK’s own official assessment estimates the deal adds only 0.13% (about £4.8 billion) to UK GDP in the long run. This is larger than comparable post-Brexit deals with Australia or New Zealand, but modest in absolute terms, and a reminder that FTAs are rarely transformative on their own.
Third, and most important for exporters everywhere, GTRI analysts rightly caution that CETA creates market access, not guaranteed exports; without matching investment in certification, sanitary and phytosanitary compliance, logistics and buyer relationships, tariff concessions risk remaining benefits on paper.
The clearest beneficiaries are labour-intensive, price-sensitive exporters: garments and textiles (which had suffered a duty disadvantage against Bangladesh and Cambodia), leather and footwear, marine products and processed foods.
Pharmaceuticals stand out as a strategic win: India exports $23.31 billion of medicines globally, against a UK medicines import market of nearly $30 billion, and the removal of the 8% tariff should sharpen the competitiveness of Indian generics in Europe’s gateway market.
Automobiles present a longer-horizon opportunity, given India’s current 0.4% share of the UK’s $92.2 billion vehicle import market, though Indian passenger car and EV manufacturers retain a protective quota window of their own on UK imports.
Goa is not a mass-manufacturing state, but it punches above its weight in precisely the sectors CETA touches most directly. Goa’s pharmaceutical cluster exported goods worth roughly Rs 6,527 crore in a recent fiscal year, making the state the sixth-largest pharma exporter in India with a 5.6% share of the country’s total pharmaceutical exports, a base well positioned to benefit from the zero-duty UK pathway now open to Indian generics and formulations.
Seafood is Goa’s second natural entry point: the state exported over 45,000 tonnes of fish in a recent year, concentrated in mackerel and squid, currently oriented toward Southeast Asia. The elimination of the UK’s 21.5% marine-products tariff creates a genuine incentive to diversify buyer geography, provided Goan processors can meet UK sanitary and traceability standards, which are considerably more exacting than those in existing Southeast Asian markets.
Goa’s alcoholic beverage sector, the Feni and other spirits, sits in an interesting position too: As UK tariffs on premium spirits ease reciprocally and India’s own duty on Scotch falls from 150% toward 75% in year one, Goan distillers will face sharper import competition domestically even as their own export ambitions gain a marginally friendlier UK tariff environment for local craft and heritage spirits, if pursued with GI-backed branding.
For the emerging Goa’s entrepreneurship ecosystem, the practical task ahead is translation, not celebration: helping Goan MSMEs in pharma formulation, seafood processing and craft beverages navigate rules-of-origin documentation, UK regulatory certification and buyer discovery.
(Prof. (Dr.) Manoj S. Kamat is Post Doctoral Fellow (Economic Policy) and PhD. (Finance) from IIT Bombay, and serves as Professor and Principal of Dempo Charities Trust’s SS Dempo College of Commerce & Economics at Cujira-Bambolim).
