India is ready to swiftly sign and implement the “mother of all trade deals” struck with the European Union in January, the country’s ambassador to the European Union, Saurabh Kumar, told Euronews’ flagship morning show Europe Today.
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“As soon as the EU is able to complete its internal processes, we will be in a position to sign the deal,” ambassador Kumar said in an interview with Euronews’ EU editor Maria Tadeo.
“We are very confident that the deal will be signed very quickly,” ambassador Kumar added. “My understanding is that both sides will be working fast to see that the deal will be signed as quickly as possible.”
The free-trade agreement was inked last month promising to double EU exports to India by 2032 by cutting tariffs on approximately 96% of EU exports to the country, saving around €4 billion a year in duties for European companies. Meanwhile, for India, the deal offered some relief after the US targeted country with prohibitive sanctions.
At its full potential, the deal creates a market of 2 billion people.
The timing of the deal is important as the two sides look to de-risk their economies from US policy on trade and China’s growing surplus with the world while holding large reserves of critical minerals. Ambassador Kumar hailed the deal as a “strategic” win in a “multipolar world”.
“The EU and India are important poles in this configuration,” he explained, adding that it’s EU-India cooperation is crucial “for our mutual benefit and for global stability also.”
Asked whether Trump’s aggressive trade policies had been a catalyst to the deal, he said that “the India-EU relationship stands on its own feet” and “has its own merits,” but acknowledged the need to reduce over-reliances in a more volatile trading environment.
“Over-dependencies are not good. There is a need to have redundancies built into supply chains to have multiple options,” the ambassador explained.
“The India-EU FTA is also very important also in view of de-risking our respective economies, building in redundancies, having more manufacturing options and I think in this respect the deal will serve a very useful purpose,” he added.
A ‘new phase’ of EU-India collaboration
The ambassador spoke to Euronews as India hosts world leaders, including the French President Emmanuel Macron and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, at the India-AI Impact Summit in New Delhi.
The ambassador hailed both technology and defence as important areas of collaboration as the EU-India relationship enters a “new phase”. In parallel, the EU also signed a security and defence partnership on the margins of the EU-India Summit
“As we go further, defence and particularly defence industries, and technological aspects will become more important in the EU-India relationship,” he explained.
Watch the full interview in the video player above.
