India and ASEAN set deadlines for unfinished goods-pact review

India and ASEAN have set time-bound tasks for negotiators reviewing their goods trade agreement, seeking faster progress on unfinished chapters after the latest Joint Committee meeting in Jakarta.

Financial Express reported the October 6–9 discussions, while India’s Ministry of Commerce and Industry confirmed that the 15th ASEAN-India Trade in Goods Agreement Joint Committee directed all eight sub-committees to accelerate work and coordinate closely.

The ASEAN-India pact is a free trade agreement, establishing preferential trading conditions among its participants. Reviewing the pact involves negotiating changes to those conditions; the latest statement sets a process for further work rather than announcing completed amendments.

Three sub-committees held related meetings on legal and institutional issues, national treatment and market access, and rules of origin. National treatment concerns the treatment of imported goods compared with domestic goods after entry. Market access concerns the conditions for entering a market. Origin rules determine the national source of a product and can affect whether it qualifies for preferential treatment.

Other reported work areas include customs procedures and trade facilitation, health requirements for food, animals and plants, product standards and technical requirements with procedures to check compliance, and measures addressing harmful or unfair imports.

The next Joint Committee meeting is planned for January 2027 in India in a hybrid format. It is intended to assess the groups’ progress and give further guidance toward concluding the negotiations.

The goods pact became operational in 2010. According to Financial Express, India began asking for a review within five years as imports from ASEAN expanded and expected gains failed to materialise.

The newspaper reported that it took four years for India to secure ASEAN’s agreement to a review in November 2019, followed by another two years before negotiations began. A later deadline to complete the exercise by the end of 2025 was missed.

India’s trade deficit with ASEAN widened from US$4.98 billion in 2010–11, the first full year of the pact’s operation, to US$51.54 billion in 2025–26, the newspaper reported. The deficit measures the excess of import value over export value; it does not itself measure all the pact’s economic effects.

The latest meeting was co-chaired by Nitin Kumar Yadav, Additional Secretary in India’s Department of Commerce, and Mastura Ahmad Mustafa, Deputy Secretary General for Trade at Malaysia’s Ministry of Investment, Trade and Industry. Their names and roles are also confirmed in the Indian ministry’s release.

The trading relationship covers electronics, machinery, chemicals, petroleum products, agricultural commodities and other manufactured goods. Those sectors place both border procedures and the practical conditions for qualifying goods within the scope of the review.