India’s billion-dollar trade juggernaut has an unwanted case of missing balance

India’s early FTAs promised a two-way trade highway, but 15 years later the traffic looks decidedly one-sided. Deficits with ASEAN, Japan and South Korea have ballooned as imports raced ahead of exports. Trade experts say the answer is not to shut the road, but to repair it — from tariff imbalances and non-tariff barriers to poor FTA utilisation and costly inputs at home.