Visas not first priority for India in FTA with U.K.: High Commissioner Doraiswami

India and the U.K. have been negotiating a trade agreement since 2022, with the 14th round completed before the Indian elections kicked off in April this year

Indian High Commissioner to the U.K. Vikram Doraiswami 

A request for more visas for Indian citizens, often described in the British press as one of the central challenges to concluding an India-U.K. ‘free trade’ agreement (FTA), was not the top priority for the government, Indian High Commissioner to the U.K.  Vikram Doraiswami has said.

“Visas are not the first priority for us in an FTA,” Mr. Doraiswami said. He was speaking at the first session of the India Global Forum on Monday in London. The forum, an annual event that brings together Indian and British policy makers, industrialists and others, is organised by Manoj Ladwa, a corporate lawyer-turned-government affairs adviser and close associate of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

India and the U.K. have been negotiating a trade agreement since 2022, with the 14th round completed before the Indian elections kicked off in April this year. India has been seeking greater ease of movement for highly skilled professionals (such as those in the IT and healthcare fields) to come to the U.K. to deliver services. It has also sought a reduction in tariffs on a number of goods. The U.K. has wanted greater access to the Indian services sector and a cut in duties on various goods, including whiskey and cars.

“We are not seeking to be essentially looking at the FTA as a means to bring people in the U.K.,” Mr. Doraiswami said.

India was looking for a reasonable level of movement of natural persons to deliver services in the territory of the trade partner (the U.K. in this case) under Mode 4 of GATS (General Agreement on Trade in Services), he said.

Mr. Doraiswami specifically referred to intra-company transfers, saying there were over 970 subsidiaries of Indian companies in the U.K and that firms would want an easier movement of employees across borders.

Student visas

Regarding student visas, Mr. Doraiswami said it was up to the British electorate to decide on questions such as the post-study work visa in the U.K. The programme was recently questioned by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s Conservative government on the grounds that the visas were being abused as a door to migration to the U.K. The U.K. government’s independent adviser, however, had declared that the system was not being abused. Several of Mr. Sunak’s Cabinet colleagues also opposed restricting the system. Mr. Sunak consequently backed away from plans to restrict the visa.

“We’re not asking necessarily that you must make this [post-study visas] a critical part of the FTA,” Mr. Doraiswami said as he suggested that Indian students would judge the attractiveness of the U.K. as an educational destination relative to, for instance, the U.S., Canada or Australia where they had opportunities to work after their degree.

Asked about greater India-U.K. cooperation across other dimensions, such as the security partnership, Mr. Doraiswami said that the two countries were looking to work together more on security policy but also the “hard edge of security itself “, for instance, military-to-military cooperation and co-development and co-production of technology. This would entail achieving a certain level of interoperability between the Indian and U.K. militaries, he said.

Without mentioning China, Mr. Doraiswami said that for India it was critical that the rules-based order and freedom of navigation were observed in the Indo Pacific and with the capacity of all states to contribute to the security of the region. This was also an area of importance to the U.K. and other European countries and the two countries could work together on this.