India and Chile Embark Upon Formal Negotiations Toward Comprehensive Economic Convergence
Terms of Reference Signed for Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement, Signalling Epochal Deepening of Bilateral Commercial Architecture
New Delhi, 09 May 2025 — In an act of strategic foresight and economic alignment, the Republic of India and the Republic of Chile have executed the Terms of Reference (ToR) on 08 May 2025 for the impending negotiations of a Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA), marking a deliberate and high-level intensification of their already robust trade relationship.
The meticulously crafted ToR was duly signed by His Excellency Mr. Juan Angulo, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Chile to India, and Shri Vimal Anand, Joint Secretary in the Department of Commerce under the aegis of the Ministry of Commerce & Industry, Government of India—also serving as the Chief Negotiator for the CEPA from the Indian side. This formal signature signifies not merely a procedural milestone but a calibrated move toward institutionalizing a more sophisticated economic symbiosis between the two sovereign nations.
The bilateral consensus articulated within the ToR seeks to evolve from the confines of the extant Preferential Trade Agreement (PTA), signed in 2006 and subsequently expanded in 2016, into an encompassing and forward-looking CEPA. This agreement is envisioned to integrate critical and emergent domains such as digital trade, micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs), investment facilitation, regulatory convergence, cooperation in critical minerals, and beyond—thereby forging a dense matrix of economic interoperability.
Both parties, in their concurrent statements, reaffirmed a shared geopolitical and economic ethos rooted in mutual respect and developmental parity. Their communiqué emphasized anticipation for substantive deliberations during the inaugural negotiation round, scheduled to convene in New Delhi from 26 to 30 May 2025. The CEPA, once actualized, is projected to function as an institutional mechanism to catalyze bilateral exports, augment employment generation, and precipitate a diversified investment architecture.
This latest development must be contextualized within the historic trajectory of Indo-Chilean economic relations, inaugurated by the signing of the Framework Agreement on Economic Cooperation in January 2005. This was succeeded by the PTA in March 2006 and later its expansion in September 2016, which came into effect on 16 May 2017. From 2019 to 2021, both parties sustained three rigorous rounds of negotiations aimed at enhancing the scope of this trade protocol. The conceptual groundwork for CEPA was laid down by the Joint Study Group (JSG) constituted under the original Framework Agreement, whose conclusive report was formalized on 30 April 2024.
The present articulation of economic convergence was underscored during the recent State visit of the Chilean President, His Excellency Mr. Gabriel Boric Font, to India (1–5 April 2025), upon the invitation of the Honourable Prime Minister of India, Shri Narendra Modi. Both Heads of State acknowledged that the commercial corridor between their nations stands as an unshakable pillar of bilateral diplomacy, necessitating an enhanced architecture that transcends preferential tariffs and reaches into the higher-order domains of strategic economic alignment.
With the formalization of the ToR, India and Chile embark upon a journey of economic codification poised to culminate in an ambitious, reciprocal, and comprehensive agreement. This accord, if negotiated to its fullest potential, shall serve not merely as a trade instrument but as a lodestar for South-South cooperation in an era of fractured global supply chains and emergent plurilateral alignments.
