India–EU FTA: Raising the bar for material innovation
When trade agreements make headlines, the focus is usually on tariffs, expected export gains and market access. That is understandable. But the recently concluded India–EU Free Trade Agreement (FTA), for which negotiations were completed on 27 January 2026 after nearly two decades of negotiation, is expected to expand Indian textile exports to the EU from roughly today to as much as $30–40 billion, according to commerce minister Piyush Goyal. Prime Minister Narendra Modi with European Council President António Luís Santos da Costa and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, at Hyderabad House. (DPR PMO) As Indian manufacturers are expected to gain preferential EU access to one of the world’s most demanding consumer markets, they will also face rising pressure to meet expectations shaped by Europe’s evolving approach to product safety, material performance and sustainability. This matters because, in practice, market access is never just about crossing borders. It is also about crossing thresholds. In Europe, those thresholds are increasingly being defined not only by price and quality in the conventional sense, but by how …
