Reverse India's trend of trade barriers going up

Global trade patterns are in flux but there's an optimist's case for us to lower import tariffs to sharpen domestic competitiveness. It will also support our global value chain ambitions

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Free trade is out of favour in much of the world, with barriers being upped in the West, the World Trade Organization largely ineffective and globalization subject to a geopolitical split once again after a three-decade run. Not that it was a garden walk earlier, as fractious talks had left the globe with a jumble of bilateral deals instead of an orderly layout for a global market. India's import tariffs were slashed by a big policy shift towards openness in the 1990s, but had crept up on average by the time New Delhi signalled an emphatic trade reorientation in late 2019, when India walked away from the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), an emerging trade zone of the East with China as its biggest member, to pursue free-trade agreements (FTAS) with Western and West Asian economies. Moves by multinational firms to diversify global value chains (GVCs) and the idea of 'friend-shoring' have given wind to our West-bound sails since the pandemic, making the switch seem prescient, but there was a push factor too. India's rejection of RCEP wa