The ASEAN trade review: fixing a deficit that widened for fifteen years

India's oldest major regional trade pact is also its most lopsided. The ASEAN–India Trade in Goods Agreement, AITIGA, was signed in 2009 and implemented from 2010, and in the years since, India's trade deficit with the ten-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations has widened from about 7 billion dollars in 2010 to 51.55 billion dollars in 2025–26. Bilateral trade reached 128.38 billion dollars in 2025–26, with ASEAN accounting for 10.55 per cent of India's total global trade, so the relationship is far too large to walk away from — but, in India's argument, too unbalanced to leave unchanged.

That is why the two sides are reviewing the agreement. ASEAN agreed to a review after India raised concerns about the deficit, but agreeing on the terms of the review has proved difficult, and hopes that it would conclude at the ASEAN–India Summit in October 2025 were not met. At the 15th AITIGA Joint Committee meeting in Jakarta from 6 to 9 October 2026, co-chaired by Additional Secretary Nitin Kumar Yadav of India's Department of Commerce and Malaysia's Deputy Secretary-General Mastura Ahmad Mustafa, the committee directed its eight sub-committees to expedite pending chapters with firm, time-bound deliverables. Three sub-committees — on legal and institutional issues, national treatment and market access, and rules of origin — met alongside the committee. The next Joint Committee meeting is scheduled in India in January 2027.

India's asks in the review are specific. It wants to correct tariff asymmetries and remove non-tariff barriers that limit its exports, and it wants stronger rules of origin to prevent what it describes as circumvention: Chinese goods allegedly routed through ASEAN countries to claim preferential tariffs. ASEAN members, for their part, have pressed for deeper tariff cuts from India. The Department of Commerce has sought industry feedback on products where tariffs could be reduced without harming domestic manufacturers, favouring lines where India is a net exporter.

The AITIGA review is a test of a wider question in Indian trade policy: whether agreements signed in an earlier era, when India was more defensive about opening its market, can be rebalanced without unravelling them. The review's slow pace — years of talks, a missed 2025 deadline, and a January 2027 meeting as the next milestone — shows how hard it is to renegotiate a deal with ten partners who have different interests, even when all sides accept, as the Jakarta statement did, that the outcome should be balanced, constructive and forward-looking.