UAE-India CEPA: A year of remarkable progress

Dr Thanibin Ahmed Al Zeyoudi

(Minister of State for Foreign Trade, United Arab Emirates)

Mr Piyush Goyal,

(Minister of Commerce & Industry, Consumer Affairs, Food & Public Distribution, and Textiles, Government of India.)

Why closer ties between India and the United Arab Emirates will continue to create opportunity and boost prosperity

One year ago, on February 18, 2022, the United Arab Emirates and India embarked on an exciting new chapter in our long and fruitful relationship. On that Friday evening in New Delhi, His Highness Sheikh Mohamed Bin Zayed, then Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Deputy Supreme Commander of the UAE Armed Forces, and His Excellency Prime Minister of India Shri Narendra Modi witnessed the signing of the UAE-India Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement—a landmark accord designed to enhance strategic cooperation between our nations and propel regional growth.

As the UAE’s first-ever bilateral trade deal and India’s first with a country in the MENA region, it was a genuine milestone but, more importantly, a reflection of our shared belief in the power of economic openness and integration. By removing or reducing tariffs on more than 80 percent of product lines, enhancing market access to services exports, facilitating investment flows into priority sectors, and providing a platform for SMEs to collaborate and scale, we were envisioning a new era of opportunity in an uncertain world.

For the UAE, the CEPA would offer our exporters seamless entry to the fifth-largest economy in the world, a nation with a rapidly emerging middle class and a burgeoning technology ecosystem. For India, it promised a gateway to emerging economies in the Middle East and Africa and a dynamic, business-friendly platform for industries and innovators to flourish. For us both, it would secure supply chains and offer a pathway to US $ 100 bn in annual non-oil trade by the end of the decade.

Looking back, it seems remarkable that such a far-reaching and ambitious agreement could be negotiated in less than three months. However, this deal wasn’t forged in a matter of months but over more than five decades of trust, collaboration, and exchange. This UAE-India CEPA was less an economic revolution than a logical next step for two countries whose histories have become so indelibly entwined.

In the year since the signing and across the nine months since its full implementation, all the metrics indicate this deal wasn’t only welcome but, in a challenging economic environment, very much necessary. In 2022, the value of non-oil bilateral trade reached US $ 49 billion, a 10 percent increase on 2021 and a significant stride towards our 2030 target. India’s exports to the UAE grew 26 percent, and re-exports climbed 10 percent, underscoring our status as a vital trade enabler. The Dubai Chamber of Commerce also reported that they had registered 11,000 new Indian companies in 2022, bringing the total to more than 83,000, which will further strengthen the economic and cultural bonds between us.

Beyond the balance sheet

Of course, there is more to the CEPA’s success than statistics. Both of us have led our respective delegations to each other’s countries to further deepen these ever-strengthening bilateral economic linkages. In March 2022, Sh. Goyal led a high-level delegation, comprised of senior government officials, Indian exporters, and industry leaders, to the UAE in an effort to galvanise our businesses towards greater collaboration under the then newly laid CEPA ecosystem. Now, a little over a week ago, H.E. Al Zeyoudiled led a delegation of officials, business leaders, and entrepreneurs to India, which offered considerable brick-and-mortar evidence of the collaboration now being catalyzed.

In Bengaluru, for instance, the UAE delegation attended the opening of Ducab Group’s new regional office, which will enable it to better serve the Indian energy and construction sectors with its market-leading cables and metal products. Then, during the UAE delegation’s visit to the Global Investor Summit in Uttar Pradesh, a review was undertaken of UAE’s private-sector’s US $ 2.5 billion investment into renewable energy, logistics, retail, and food processing projects in India’s most populous state– all of which have the potential to create 20,000 jobs.

They follow several other significant partnerships launched since May 2022, such as the 300-megawatt hybrid renewable energy project in Gujarat and the sustainable food parks across India that will utilise advanced technologies to reduce waste and conserve water. Also last year, DP World launched the Dubai Incubator Center, a technology accelerator platform set up in partnership with Invest India and the Start-Up Kerala Mission to encourage innovation across India’s logistics sector.

The complementary nature of our relationship is yet to reach its true potential. If some of the recent, post-CEPA investments from the UAE to India are anything to go by, then, as they say, the sky is the limit for our collaboration. There are many potentially pathbreaking initiatives that are on the anvil, be it the virtual trade corridors or the potential set-up of offices of the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority in GIFT City in the Indian state of Gujarat. We are just warming up to a future of limitless possibilities and mutually win-win collaborations between our two countries.

It is this type of dynamic joint venture that embodies the real potential of our CEPA: the fusion of all forms of capital—human, technological, and financial—to develop and deploy solutions that can have a genuine world-changing impact.

A changing economic map

Critically, the UAE and India’s partnership will ensure our nations can capitalise on the changing global economic map—an ever-evolving landscape with Asia at its heart. According to the IMF, the Asia and Pacific Region will lead global growth this year, with a projected GDP increase of 4.6%. Over the next five years, the ASEAN and South Asian regions, excluding China, will lead the world in both export and import growth.

A year ago, in a spirit of positivity and possibility, the UAE and India came together to embrace these new realities and set our nations on a path to greater growth and prosperity. It is our firm conviction that the UAE-India CEPA will not only be seen as a significant turning point in our economic stories, but a long-standing model for cross-border collaboration.