India has signed, or concluded, eight trade agreements since 2021 - Mauritius, UAE, Australia, EFTA, the United Kingdom, Oman, New Zealand, and the European Union pact - with an American framework almost done. 

The sprint is real, and in a world split into two kinds of trade policy - ratified treaty-law on one side, and press-release deals and tariff truces on the other - India has bet on the durable kind. But an unmeasured bet is a hope, not a strategy, and India has never once published what any trade agreement delivered: no annual utilisation report, no ex-post evaluation, nothing a citizen, an exporter or the Parliament can read.

The case for a comprehensive review is written into the agreements' own histories. The Korea pact has been under "upgradation" since 2016; the ASEAN review has run since 2023; Japan's began this year. When every major agreement ends up in repair talks, the fault lies less with the partners than with the process.

The numbers from the first generation of agreements explain why. Under the Japan CEPA, India's exports were $6.4 billion in 2012 and $6.1 billion in 2025 - thirteen years of a treaty and a negative compound growth rate on the export side, while imports nearly doubled. Under the Korea CEPA, exports have sat near $6 billion for over a decade and fell 9.3% between FY24 and FY25. With ASEAN, the deficit grew from $10.4 billion in 2012 to $51.2 billion in 2025 - a 13% compound rate - on imports of some $87 billion against exports of $36 billion.

A bilateral deficit is not a verdict; but a comparison of the pre- and post-agreement periods found India's deficit with these three partners grew two to three times faster than its deficit with the world, and Singapore, once a surplus partner, is now a $13 billion deficit. Export stagnation under a treaty whose stated purpose was export growth is not an accounting artefact. It is a finding, and no Indian government has ever published it as one.

The second generation reads better, and complicates the story. Exports to the UAE more than doubled after the 2022 CEPA - $16.7 billion to $37.4 billion by FY26, a 22% compound rate and to Australia from $4 billion to $7.3 billion; early FY27 shows a sharp rebound in shipments to FTA partners, which is exactly the kind of number a scorecard would test for base effects and tariff diversion rather than applaud. But the UAE pact also shows what a scorecard would catch: gold and silver imports from the UAE, which mines neither, more than tripled in a single year on concessional duties, while trade with the EFTA bloc has barely moved.

A whitepaper would count outcomes and would be permitted to reach the conclusion no annual press note ever does: that a given agreement, on its numbers, should be renegotiated, suspended, or should never have been signed.

A review, though, is only as good as its metrics, and here the public debate measures the wrong things. Bilateral deficits are an accounting artefact: every iPhone exported West widens our deficit with East Asia, because the components are imported before the phone is assembled here - that is what joining a global value chain looks like on a customs ledger.

Raw utilisation rates mislead; you cannot claim a discount on a price that is already zero. What a government whitepaper - published annually, agreement by agreement - should track instead: total trade as a share of GDP; the import content of our exports; utilisation adjusted for the preference margin actually on offer; services and mobility chapters converted into shipments and visas, not prose; and the performance of every review clause against its deadline.

The EFTA agreement shows the standard drafting should meet tariff concessions tied to a $100 billion investment commitment, revisable if the money does not arrive. The first Indian treaty to make a partner's promise enforceable should not be the last.

The RCEP (Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership) paradox makes the deeper point. India walked out in 2019 largely on bilateral-deficit reasoning and China-exposure fears; it then signed eight agreements on reasoning never published at all. Both decisions may even have been right. But no document exists that would let anyone check - no cost-benefit analysis accompanied the exit, and none has accompanied any entry.

Meanwhile the bloc India left will eventually free about 90% of trade among 15 members, and Vietnam integrated into the very electronics value chains India now courts with production subsidies. The lesson is not that RCEP was the road untaken; it is that India takes and declines trade roads without ever publishing a map.

Which brings the question to its constitutional home. Treaty-making in India is a purely executive act. The result: commitments that rewrite India's duty schedules for decades, and bind future Parliaments in practice, are never once voted upon by the House. Every serious democracy has repaired this. The US Congress votes on trade agreements; the European Parliament must consent; the UK lays treaties before Parliament for twenty-one sitting days before ratification; Australia routes them through a standing treaties committee. India's own Constitution Review Commission recommended, two decades ago, that the treaty power be regulated by law. Nothing followed.

The checks and balances write themselves, none needing a constitutional amendment: publish the negotiating objectives before talks begin; commission an independent impact assessment for every agreement, as American law requires of its trade commission; lay every signed agreement before Parliament for a fixed period, with committee scrutiny, before ratification; table the annual whitepaper in the House; and write review clauses whose concessions lapse when reviews outrun their deadlines. Scrutiny is not an obstacle to negotiators - it is their leverage: a government that must carry its Parliament can credibly refuse at the table what a government that answers to no one cannot.

Finally, what does a trade treaty even offer in an age of dead multilateralism and shape-shifting blocs? The one thing nothing else can: with the WTO's appellate arm defunct and ordinary market access revocable by executive order, a ratified agreement is the last instrument that makes access a legal right rather than a diplomatic mood. But the same era mass-produces the counterfeit - frameworks announced for summits and home audiences, never ratified, never scheduled, never read again. Measurement is what tells the two apart: a treaty that cannot survive its own annexures was signalling all along.

None of this is the argument of trade sceptics. It is the opposite. India's treaties are its hedge in a world of fact-sheet diplomacy, and hedges must be marked to market. A rising power does not fear its own report card; it publishes one, annually, and negotiates better because everyone can read it. India has learned to sign. The next sovereign capability is to measure — and the first signature that matters now is Parliament's.