India-UK deal can weaken India’s position in the WTO, ongoing FTA talks, caution civil society groups

The concessions offered by India to the UK in the just signed India-UK Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) will jeopardize India’s negotiating position in the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and in all its past and future Free Trade Agreements (FTAs), a group of 100 civil society organisations and trade policy researchers pointed out.

A joint platform of the group, Forum for Trade Justice, said that CETA will undermine India’s long-term efforts to protect public health from the damaging provisions of WTO’s TRIPS Agreement and to uphold the full use of TRIPS flexibilities. “India’s strong stance in the WTO and in FTAs on source code availability, open access to government data and electronic transactions, is all but unravelled. It’s cautious approach to government procurement liberalisation in the Government Procurement Agreement (GPA) of the WTO and in its FTAs is almost eliminated. There will be massive demands from developed countries to agree to the same concessions at the WTO or in other FTAs. The EU has already indicated that it expects the same or higher concessions accorded to partners such as the US or UK”, Forum for Trade Justice said in a public statement.

According to Biswajit Dhar, former professor at Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University, the agreement reached between the two countries contains intellectual property provisions that 'favour pharmaceutical corporations at the expense of public health.'

“It prioritizes voluntary licensing over compulsory licensing—a clear dilution of the TRIPS Flexibilities and the Doha Declaration on TRIPS and Public Health 2001 that India had continuously upheld. This severely limits access to affordable medicines. Further, the CETA reduces transparency by requiring patent holders to disclose the status of working of patents only once every three years and keeping critical information confidential, making it harder for applicants to prove their case for issuing compulsory licenses and challenge monopolies”, Dhar said.

He also pointed out that CETA pushes for patent harmonization with developed countries, potentially allowing ‘evergreening’ of patents and weakening India's current safeguards. “These changes threaten the constitutional right to health by prioritizing corporate interests over public access to essential medicines. Further, India’s stand in multilateral forums like the WTO and the UNFCCC —making technology transfer mandatory— is diluted, as the CETA supports voluntary technology transfer and on mutually agreed terms”, he added.

The civil society groups are of the opinion that the CETA has weakened development policy in digital economy and has also heavily compromised data sovereignty.

“The CETA’s e-commerce chapter marks a stunning shift”, said Sadhana Sanjay, Lead, Research & Policy Engagement, IT for Change, as “for the first time, India surrenders its right to ask for source code in its digital imports, which is extremely important for regulatory and law enforcement needs. Importantly, this prohibition applies to all software, and not only to mass-market software. Unregulated development of AI systems can pose significant dangers, which may range from replicating and exacerbating discrimination or biases to expropriating and misusing confidential data provision”.

Parminder Jeet Singh, an independent digital society researcher, added that one of the implications of the agreement could be that India, for the first time, 'has conceded that its national data, as may be held by government, is not a national resource, but an international free for all'.

“Under the CETA, this data [would] be made available through public access to ‘interested stakeholders”, he said. As he explains further, this provision 'violates the principles of resource sovereignty under international law and represents an extra-ordinary surrender of the key national resource of its data'.

Furthermore, the Forum for Trade Justice said that, as an organisation, it rejects CETA and urged the Indian government to 'seriously assess' the policy space it has conceded.

Another civil society member, Shalini Bhutani, who is an independent legal expert and trade policy analyst, pointed out that the agreement warrants a discussion in the Indian Parliament.

“The CETA will come into force only after due completion of UK parliamentary procedure. UK's Constitutional Reform and Governance (CRaG) Act warrants proper pre-ratification scrutiny of any FTA. Likewise, there ought to be discussions on this CETA in the Indian Parliament. This ought to be the norm in a parliamentary democracy", Bhutani said.