TL;DR: India has signed over 4,000 agreements/treaties/MoUs since 1950, building one of the world’s largest networks of bilateral partnerships. Most agreements focus on aid and cooperation, followed by trade and business, along with diplomatic and cultural ties.

While India has gradually deepened its trade commitments, expanding from goods to services and investment, it remains cautious in sensitive areas like agriculture, intellectual property, and digital policy. Russia accounts for the most agreements, followed by China and Myanmar.

Context
On 13 February 2025, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Donald Trump committed in a joint statement to push bilateral trade between India and the United States to $500 billion by 2030. An interim agreement framework was announced in early 2026. The stated ambition is broad: goods, services, technology, defence supply chains, digital trade, and energy.

In this article, we shall explore how India’s trade and other bilateral and multilateral agreements transformed over time. Understanding the history of India’s trade agreements is essential because today’s negotiations are shaped by decades of treaty-making. From colonial-era preferences and Cold War caution, to the post-1991 liberalisation push, the later pullback, and now a more strategic phase of deal-making, each period reshaped not just who India partnered with, but what its agreements aimed to achieve.

Who compiles this data?
The data on the list of treaties, agreements or MoUs that India signed, agreed to, and ratified, by their type, year, subject, and the country, is available on the Indian Treaties Database, collated and compiled by the Legal and Treaties Division of the Ministry of External Affairs.

Where can I download clean & structured data on Indian Treaties?

Clean, standardised, and ready-to-use dataset related to the list of treaties, MoUs, and agreements, by their type, subject, and country, can be found on Dataful.

Key Insights

Evolution of trade agreements
In the decades after Independence, India saw trade agreements mainly as tools to protect its sovereignty, not expand economic opportunity. The focus was on import substitution, by shielding domestic industries with high tariffs and limiting foreign competition. Although India joined the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1948, it avoided opening markets and signed only limited, strategic bilateral deals like the 1971 Indo-Soviet barter arrangement. Trade remained a small share of GDP, and lowering tariffs was politically difficult.

The 1991 balance-of-payments crisis marked a turning point. Facing severe foreign exchange shortages, India reduced tariffs, opened its economy, and two entirely new categories of agreement entered India’s playbook for the first time. It signed Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs) to attract foreign investment by offering legal protection. These weren’t trade deals in the conventional sense, as they didn’t touch tariffs. They were legal commitments: protections against expropriation, guarantees of fair treatment, and access to international arbitration if a foreign investor felt the host government had acted against them.

The second new tool was the Preferential Trade Agreement (PTAs): selective tariff reductions on an agreed list of goods with neighbouring countries. The India–Sri Lanka Free Trade Agreement of 1998 went further, eliminating tariffs across most goods on a phased timeline. These were narrow agreements, focused almost entirely on physical goods. Subjects like services trade, intellectual property, government procurement, environmental chapters and so on, did not appear till then.

By the mid-2000s, agreements became deeper and broader. Through Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Agreements (CECAs) and Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreements (CEPAs) with countries like Singapore, Korea, Japan, and ASEAN, India included services, investment, intellectual property, and dispute settlement provisions. Trade policy was no longer just about tariffs but also about aligning domestic regulations to facilitate trade and investment.

However, by the early 2010s, concerns grew over rising trade deficits and investment disputes. Several arbitration cases went against India, raising worries about limits on policy space. From 2016 onwards, India terminated many of its older BITs and adopted a more restrictive model treaty. In 2019, it also withdrew from the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), reflecting a more cautious approach to large trade commitments. Over time, India’s trade strategy shifted from protection to openness, and then toward calibrated engagement with stronger safeguards.

Over 4000 agreements and treaties signed by India since 1950
Over the past seven decades, India has quietly built one of the world’s most expansive webs of international partnerships. Since 1950, the country has signed more than 4,000 agreements with nations and organisations across the globe. These deals span a remarkable range of subjects: foreign aid, trade, education, public health, diplomacy, cultural exchange, and even sports. And more than 90% of all these are Bilateral treaties, with only a handful of multilateral/plurilateral treaties.

The numbers reveal clear priorities. More than a third of all agreements fall under ‘Aid and Cooperation’, suggesting that development partnerships have long been central to how India engages with the world. ‘Trade and business’ agreements come in second, accounting for roughly one in ten deals, reflecting the country’s push to deepen its economic ties abroad. Diplomatic and cultural agreements each make up about 7% of the total, underscoring India’s effort to build not just economic bridges, but people-to-people connections as well.

Most agreements with Russia, followed by China and Myanmar.

Looking at India’s agreements by country, clear patterns emerge in its long-term international partnerships. The data shows that Russia has the highest number of agreements with India, followed by China and Myanmar.

This reflects India’s sustained diplomatic, strategic, and economic engagement with these countries over the decades. With Russia, cooperation has historically spanned areas such as defence, energy, science, and technology. Agreements with China cover trade, border management, and multilateral coordination, while those with Myanmar highlight regional connectivity, security cooperation, and development partnerships.

Why does it matter?
Over the past seven decades, the biggest changes in India’s trade agreements have not been about which countries India signed with, but what issues India was willing to formally commit to. Over time, agreements have moved from limited product coverage to eliminating tariffs on most traded goods. At the same time, India has consistently protected key interests such as access to Indian agricultural markets and intellectual property, where it has avoided stricter patent rules to safeguard its generic pharmaceutical industry.

Digital trade is now the biggest open question. Modern trade agreements led by the United States typically include binding rules that allow free cross-border data flows, prohibit mandatory data localisation, and prevent governments from requiring disclosure of source code. India’s domestic digital policies, the requirement of data localisation and tighter platform regulations differ significantly from these approaches. As a result, India has so far not included binding digital trade rules in any of its agreements.

How India balances market access, domestic priorities, and global standards, particularly in areas like agriculture and digital trade, will shape its future role in the global economy.

Key Numbers

• Total Agreements, by subject:

  • Aid and Cooperation: 1473

  • Business and Trade: 441

  • Cultural Relations and Sport: 301

  • Diplomatic Relations: 267

• Total Agreements, by country:

  • Russian Federation: 177

  • China: 154

  • Myanmar: 113

  • Bangladesh: 106

  • Germany: 102