KOREA EARNS. INDIA PAYS.WHO DICTATES?

THERE is a particular kind of perfidy that arrives dressed as fortuity.

- PRABHU CHAWLA

It arrives with ceremonial fanfare and departs with your wealth. India has been living this betrayal for 16 years. It is only now finding the vocabulary to name it.Recently, a day before South Korean President Lee Jae Myung’s aircraft touched down at Palam, the foreign ministry held its customary pre-visit briefing at South Block. While briefing the reporters, Secretary (East) P Kumaran made an unusual disclosure: “Bilateral trade is close to $27 billion, but it is quite unbalanced. Our exports are in the range of about $6.5 billion, while Korea’s is about $21.35 billion. So there is a need to rebalance the CEPA (Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement).”

The sentence was deliberate and it wasn’t a diplomatic deviation. It was the government publicly naming an asymmetry that had gone diplomatically unspoken for 16 years. What followed—the handshakes, the fanfare, the 16 MoUs, the headline promise of doubling bilateral trade to $54 billion by 2030—must be read against that uncomfortable reality.

India’s exports to South Korea plummeted to $5.82 billion in 2024-25, as against $8 billion in 2021-22. Korean exports to India have surged to $21.06 billion over the same time. The trade deficit, at $15.2 billion in 2024-25, has roughly tripled since the 2010 CEPA came into force. Indian exports to Korea contracted at an 11 percent compound annual rate between 2021-22 and 2023-24, while Korean imports grew 10 percent a year. Fifteen years of CEPA have tripled the gap that the 2030 trade target will now have to close.

The roughly $50-billion bilateral target Modi and Lee announced is not new. Moon Jae-in and Modi set the same goal in 2019. What is new is Delhi’s public acknowledgement that hitting that number without fixing the ratio would simply enlarge the chasm.