The India-New Zealand Free Trade Agreement, signed early this week, is now being described as “once in a generation”. For an FTA that took just nine months to piece together, it can only be seen in a different light. Complex FTAs take years for a reason, and they require granular negotiation. This bypassed all that. When you strip away the ceremony, a number of fundamental issues arise that neither side’s press releases mention.

MSMEs and past FTA concerns

India’s FTAs have always wrought a systemic problem that nearly no one in the Indian policy conversation tackles aggressively: Indian exporters, particularly the MSMEs. India’s FTAs with ASEAN, South Korea, and Japan all generated significant controversy precisely because import penetration into India rose sharply while Indian........

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