Did India Concede Future Flexibility in the India-UK Trade Deal?

India’s existing FTAs, including those signed with the UAE, MERCOSUR, and EFTA, do not contain any such mechanism that ties future treaty-making to consultation rights. Before the India–UK FTA, especially in areas such as intellectual property, digital trade, and government procurement, India had largely steered clear of making forward-looking procedural commitments. Moreover, it offered no foothold for partners to monitor or leverage its future negotiations with third countries. Prima facie, the inclusion of these clauses suggests a tacit acknowledgment by India of the limited convergence between its domestic regulatory framework and the evolving global trade regime.

Any trade agreement is premised on the foundation of symmetry and reciprocity. A forward review mechanism that selectively scrutinises only India’s future conduct, as is the case in Intellectual Property and Government Procurement chapters, introduces a structural asymmetry. Granting one party the exclusive right to initiate consultations for upward alignment, regardless of the distinct policy context in which India may have acted in negotiations with a third party, risks setting a precedent that could prove difficult to contain in future negotiations. Such clauses introduce a degree of treaty elasticity and risk making India's regulatory choices the first tile in a broader game of dominoes, where one concession to a third-party may trigger a cascade of unintended renegotiations. For India, which is simultaneously engaged in FTA negotiations with major partners such as the EU and the US, the decision to accept this clause in the India-UK FTA is not without consequence. To illustrate, reports suggest that the EU has been urging India to adopt GDPR-aligned data protection standards as a prerequisite for concluding the India-EU Free Trade Agreement. Given that the EU is unlikely to sign an FTA without such commitments on data flows, the forward review mechanism in the India-UK FTA effectively enables the UK to capitalise on any future digital liberalisation that India extends to the EU.

An isolated instance?
There is no denying that the India–UK FTA is a product of an increasingly fluid and volatile trade landscape, where supply chains fracture overnight, tariffs are announced in 280 characters, and global economic emergencies routinely override institutional predictability. In such a world, the instinct to embed dynamic mechanisms into trade agreements is understandable. The forward review mechanism, in that sense, is not entirely novel - it is old wine in new bottles, a reinvention of traditional soft safeguards to navigate an increasingly uncertain global order. Yet, this wine bottle seems to be poured generously into one party’s glass.

It is evident that the mechanism has been deployed narrowly in the India-UK FTA. If the intent was to anticipate future challenges, the Environment Chapter could have included a forward review clause to mitigate the UK’s proposed Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism or at least have allowed India to seek consultations for transitional relief or technical carve-outs. That is conspicuously absent. It demonstrates that the forward review mechanism has not been used as a broad governance tool across, but rather as a targeted instrument in areas where India is expected to evolve or liberalise in alignment with Global North regimes.

The question, therefore, is not whether forward review mechanisms belong in modern FTAs - they do. The real question is whether they should be designed to lean disproportionately on the conduct of one party alone. As India pursues negotiations with the European Union, the US, and other major Western trade partners, this new tool in India’s treaty toolkit deserves closer scrutiny. The risk here is not merely of prematurely committing to future alignments, but of creating a dynamic where each future step could compel India to justify its sovereign decisions and return to the negotiating table, particularly in emerging issues where harmonisation may be neither strategic nor in its best interest.

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