India & UK Sign First Trade Deal with Gender Equality Chapter

• India agrees on its first full gender equality chapter in a trade agreement in the CETA with the UK.
• It is a change of approach from India's traditional position of excluding non-trade matters.

India has signed up for the first time to a comprehensive chapter on gender equality in trade, with the newly signed Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) between the country and the United Kingdom, in addition to an explicit statement in the preamble to “increasing women's access to and ability to benefit maximally from the opportunities generated by this Agreement”, while gender experts are hailing.

Before this, only the India-UAE Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA) of 2022 had a reference in the chapter on micro, small and medium-sized enterprises regarding enhancement of bilateral cooperation on initiatives for SMEs owned by youth and women, startups.

It also facilitates partnership among such SMEs and their engagement in foreign trade as well as sharing of information on entrepreneurship education and awareness programmes for youth and women to facilitate the entrepreneurial ecosystem.

India has been a proactive champion of gender equality at the global level, ratifying the United Nations General Assembly's Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), which was adopted in 1979.

It is a signatory to the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action adopted in 1995 in favor of women's empowerment while also remaining firmly committed to the realization of Goal 5 of the UN's 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) that seeks to reach gender equality and empowerment of all women and girls.

Furthermore, India endorses the Addis Ababa Action Agenda (2015) that identifies the significant contribution of international trade as a driver for economic growth that is inclusive and promotes poverty reduction and explicitly emphasizes its potential to promote women's empowerment.

Nonetheless, historically India has avoided associating so-called ‘non-trade/progressive matters’ like human rights, labour standards, gender along with environment with international trade being bilaterally and multilaterally, for the most part considering them as ‘veiled protectionism’.