The multilateral trading system is broken. The World Trade Organization’s Doha round expired years ago without ceremony. Its dispute settlement machinery — long the protection of small countries against big ones — has been allowed to seize up. Rules are now being written in regional clubs that do not wait for Geneva. India can either mourn the old order or join the new one.
Perhaps the most attractive of the new clubs lies in the Pacific. The Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) binds 12 economies — among them Japan, Canada, Australia, Vietnam and, since December 2024, Great Britain. Together they generate nearly $13.5 trillion, about 13.5 per cent of world output, and house 500 million consumers. Tariffs on most of the goods traded within the bloc have been eliminated. Commerce among members has grown by more than 7 per cent a year since 2019, briskly outpacing their trade with everyone else.
It is the composition of trade, as much as its size, that should interest India. CPTPP exchange is well diversified — primary goods, processed products, components, capital equipment — and tightly enmeshed in the value chains that organise modern manufacturing. Membership buys not merely cheaper access to a dozen markets but also a place in the vast networks that connect them.
As it stands, India’s presence is modest. The bloc buys around $62 billion of Indian goods a year, under 1.5 per cent of its imports. Even what India sells — pharmaceuticals, refined fuel, gems, textiles, metals — its share is thin. Across its 50 largest export lines into the group, the median share is only about 5 per cent. Measures of trade intensity confirm what the eye suspects, that India ships less to the CPTPP members than the size of those economies would lead one to expect. The shortfall reflects barriers, not incapacity.
Sceptics will recall why India withdrew from the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership in 2019: Fear of Chinese goods arriving through the front door and drowning out our own manufacturing sector, especially small and medium firms. The worry was not unfair but the CPTPP answers it twice over. China is not a member, and the agreement’s rules of origin are specifically built to stop outsiders from free-riding through token processing. And the pact India would enter is a gentler thing than the American-designed original. When America walked out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership in 2017, the remaining members went on to form the CPTPP and suspended 22 of the most onerous clauses: On intellectual property, investor-state arbitration and public procurement — precisely those that would have pinched Indian generics makers and cramped policy. The clauses are dormant, not dead.
Therein lies a case for haste. The suspended provisions can be revived by consensus. Should Washington return — and American trade policy has recently been nothing if not changeable — the hard terms would snap back and India’s price of entry would rise. The door stands open and the barrier to entry is low largely because the bloc’s weightiest potential member is loitering outside it. That state of affairs may not last.
A domestic bonus comes attached. India’s exporters are generally concentrated in the West and North. The East and South, for all their promise in electronics, food processing and textiles, have trailed behind. Several CPTPP members lie directly off India’s eastern coast. Tying trade to that map could draw money and infrastructure towards the laggard regions and diversify India’s export map spatially.
The familiar objection, that the club’s labour, environmental and intellectual property standards lie well beyond India’s reach, is overdone. India already has trade deals with Britain, Japan, Australia and Singapore, which comprise a third of the membership. Indeed, free-trade agreements have lately become the centrepiece of India’s commercial strategy; joining the CPTPP is the natural next step. Accession to the CPTPP is not automatic and may not even be easy, but the alternative of assembling equivalent access one bilateral deal at a time will certainly be a lot harder.
India is right to pursue agreements with America and the European Union — and those talks will proceed at their own pace. The CPTPP is finished, road-tested and waiting, with many years of growth behind it and rules that India, for now, can stomach. In a world where the certainties of trade and geopolitics are dissolving, a ready-made bargain on tolerable terms is a rare prize. India should try and claim it before the moment passes entirely.
The authors are, respectively, with Johns Hopkins University, Washington DC, and NCAER, New Delhi
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