Russia’s first deputy Denis Manturov said two-way trade between India and Russia has grown more than five-fold in the past five years.
India is confident of achieving commerce worth $100 billion with Russia before the target date of 2030 though the two sides need to address constraints to ensure trade is more balanced, external affairs minister S Jaishankar said on Tuesday.
The two sides have seen “perceptible progress” in tackling challenges to trade, especially issues related to payments and logistics, but there is “still some work to be done”, Jaishankar said while co-chairing a meeting of the main body that oversees bilateral trade and technical cooperation with Russia’s first deputy prime minister Denis Manturov.
Jaishankar’s remarks built on his comments at the India-Russia Business Forum in Mumbai on Monday about the need to address the imbalance in bilateral trade. India has run up a trade deficit of almost $57 billion with Russia, largely due to massive purchases of Russian crude since 2022. In July, the two sides set a target of ramping up trade to $100 billion by 2030.
India is confident about achieving this trade target well before 2030, Jaishankar said in his opening remarks at the meeting of the Intergovernmental Commission on Trade, Economic, Scientific, Technical and Cultural Cooperation (IGC-TEC) as the two economies are complementary and benefit from “trust and confidence built over many years”.
While growth in bilateral trade, currently estimated at $66 billion, is impressive, the two sides have some way to go in tackling challenges, Jaishankar said.
“Our goal is that [trade] needs to be more balanced and that will require addressing current constraints and undertaking greater facilitative efforts. Making it easier to do trade should be accompanied by progress in negotiations on the India-Eurasian Economic Union FTA,” he said.