Comment: India and the WTO. (1995, 2004, 20 Marks)
India was a founding contracting party of GATT (1947) and a founding member of the WTO on 1 January 1995. Its record is not one of conversion. The positions it took in the Uruguay Round persist three decades later: agriculture is a livelihood question, patents move income from the users of technology to its holders, and development must come before new subjects. What has changed is India’s leverage, from an outvoted objector to a member whose assent is needed for any significant outcome.
Phase 1: The Uruguay bargain (1986–94)
- India and Brazil opposed bringing the “new issues” of services, intellectual property and investment measures into a trade body, calling it forum-shifting.
- The Dunkel Draft (1991) set off farmer mobilisation over seed and medicine patents. India still signed at Marrakesh (1994) because the single undertaking forced a choice between the whole package and exclusion.
- Costs: product patents under TRIPS, which brought the Patents (Amendment) Act, 2005; and the end of balance-of-payments import curbs after the quantitative restrictions case (Appellate Body, 1999).
- Gains: binding dispute settlement, the end of textile quotas, and, ironically, services, whose IT and business-process exports became India’s largest gain from a subject it had opposed.
Phase 2: Defensive leadership (2001–15)
- India built flexibility into its law: Section 3(d) against evergreening, upheld in Novartis v Union of India (2013), and its first compulsory licence (Natco–Bayer, 2012). It helped secure the Doha Declaration on TRIPS and Public Health (2001).
- In coalition with others it had three of the four Singapore issues dropped in 2004. It insisted on a Special Safeguard Mechanism in 2008 and won the Bali peace clause for food stockholding (2013), made open-ended in 2014.
Phase 3: A system in crisis (2016–26)
- With South Africa, India proposed the COVID-19 TRIPS waiver in October 2020. MC12 (2022) produced only a vaccines-only decision.
- The Appellate Body has been paralysed since December 2019. India’s appeal in Brazil’s sugar case (DS579) remains pending, and India has not joined the interim arbitration arrangement.
- At MC14 (Yaoundé, March 2026) India and South Africa blocked the Investment Facilitation Agreement. The e-commerce moratorium lapsed, and a 67-member e-commerce agreement now proceeds without India, which questioned its interim arrangements at the July 2026 General Council. India invoked the peace clause for rice again in May 2026.
- US unilateral tariffs on India reached 50% in August 2025 before a February 2026 understanding cut them to 18%. They are now settled bilaterally, outside WTO rules. India has turned to preferential deals: the UAE and Australia (2022), EFTA (in force October 2025), the UK (in force July 2026) and the EU (concluded January 2026).
Assessment
- Sovereignty: the WTO has narrowed India’s policy choices, in tariff ceilings, subsidy formulas and patent law. Robert H. Wade called this the “shrinking of development space”. Yet India drafted much of its remaining flexibility itself, and binding rules on larger powers are worth more to a middle power than formal autonomy.
- Leverage: market size, technical capacity, coalitions (G-33, G-20) and the consensus rule let India block outcomes; Amrita Narlikar (2006) reads its “nay-saying” as strategic calculation, not obstinacy. But a veto preserves the status quo and does not build the order India wants.
- Consistency: India defends consensus while complaining of paralysis, and criticises preferential deals while signing them.
Conclusion
India’s relationship with the WTO is a long argument about whom the rules serve. India has used the system’s procedures to keep open questions it lost in 1994. Its interest lies in a functioning, rule-based WTO, with restored appeals and development kept central, because it needs enforceable rules more than the powers that disabled them do.