India needs to ramp up bilateral relations for trade, investment: Finance Minister

28 Feb 2025 Evaluate

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has said that India needs to ramp up its bilateral relations for trade and investment, as the world is witnessing a churn, and bilateralism seems to be the new catalyst tool. She said these are very interesting yet challenging times and the government is making all efforts to make India move up the ladder and be an engine of global growth. She said ‘Bilateralism is now taking the top of the agenda… It is for us to ramp up our bilateral relations with many countries, not just for trade, not just for investment, but also for strategic relations. So multilateralism, sort of, out, I’m still saying with a qualifying word ‘sort of out’, but bilateralism is very much your only catalytic tool that you can use’.

Observing that multilateral institutions are increasingly fading away, she said every attempt to revive them and energize them is not having the desired result. She said ‘So, where you have to address issues which affect more than your own country. You have no more forums left which can effectively deliver… multilateral institutions and their contributions probably are fading away, at least in the near future, till an attempt is made to revive them with that kind of energy… It’s not going to happen in the next few years’.

Asserting that global trade is undergoing a complete reset, she said ‘the terms and references with which all of us played trade, with some kind of an anchor in the World Trade Organization are no longer available.’ She said there is no Most Favoured Nation (MFN) concept, and added that every country wants to be treated special, and every country wants to be sure that special treatment that they get is not by default. She said ‘So if the WTO is getting weakened or multilateral institutions are not being effective… bilateral arrangements are going to be the order of the day in terms of trade’. 

Sensing the movement toward a new world, India has initiated bilateral trade talks with many nations including the UK and is planning a bilateral trade agreement with the US. India is also in discussion with the 27-nation grouping - the European Union, for a free trade pact. Talking about reforms, Sitharaman said, it is something which the government will continue to do in various areas including debt management and maintaining fiscal prudence.


© 2025 The Alchemists Ark Pvt. Ltd. All rights reserved. MoneyWorks4Me ® is a registered trademark of The Alchemists Ark Pvt. Ltd.

×