8 active areas of cooperation, as of June 2026. Click any card for the full brief.
01 HIGH-LEVEL POLITICAL EXCHANGES DEEP
Reciprocal guests of honour, annual summitry France has occupied a distinctive place in India's foreign policy since the early Cold War, offering high-technology cooperation - in nuclear energy, rocketry and aviation - largely free of the ideological conditions that came with either superpower bloc, allowing India to diversify away from pure non-alignment-versus-alliance choices from the 1960s onward.
That distinctiveness became decisive in May 1998: after India's Pokhran-II nuclear tests triggered Western sanctions, France broke ranks, declining to join the sanctions regime and becoming the first major power to open talks with India instead. President Jacques Chirac's 1998 visit converted that goodwill into India's first-ever formal Strategic Partnership with any Western nation - a genuine milestone, since it predated the broader US and European normalisation of ties with India by several years. The relationship deepened steadily through the 2000s-2010s via annual summits and a NSA-level Strategic Dialogue.
That trajectory culminated in reciprocal national-day honours - PM Modi as guest of honour at France's July 2023 National Day marking 25 years of the partnership, and President Macron as Chief Guest at India's January 2024 Republic Day - before Macron's February 2026 visit elevated ties further still, to a 'Special Global Strategic Partnership,' inaugurating the India-France Year of Innovation and adding an annual Foreign Ministers' Comprehensive Dialogue to track the Horizon 2047 roadmap. The Strategic Dialogue has now run 38 rounds, alongside PM Modi's February 2025 visit to open a new Consulate General in Marseille.
HORIZON 2047 RECIPROCAL NATIONAL DAYS
Read brief → 02 DEFENCE COOPERATION DEEP
Rafale, Scorpene and growing Atmanirbharata Defence cooperation dates to the 1960s, when French Ouragan, Mystere and Alouette aircraft entered Indian service as India began quietly diversifying its air fleet, but the relationship's defining moment came in the early 1980s: France proposed selling 110 Mirage 2000 fighter jets in 1981, and New Delhi's decision the following year to choose the Mirage over a Soviet equivalent marked one of India's first serious steps toward diversifying away from near-total dependence on Soviet military hardware.
That diversification deepened steadily over the following decades, cushioned by the trust built after France's supportive stance following the 1998 nuclear tests: the Jaguar (an Anglo-French design) and later the Rafale followed the Mirage into Indian service, while the Scorpene submarine programme, agreed in the mid-2000s, brought French submarine technology into Indian shipyards under licence - the sixth and final Scorpene was commissioned in January 2025, completing a programme initiated roughly two decades earlier. The original 36-Rafale contract, delivered in full by 2022, gave the Indian Air Force its most capable fighter to date.
Cooperation has since moved decisively from pure procurement toward co-development and localisation: a 2025 agreement for 26 Rafale-M naval aircraft includes technology transfer, fuselage production and MRO facilities in India, Safran opened India's first deep-level engine MRO centre (SAESI, Hyderabad, November 2025) alongside a joint venture with BEL to manufacture the Hammer air-to-surface weapon, and the 6th Annual Defence Dialogue (February 2026, Bengaluru) renewed the underlying 10-year defence cooperation agreement. Regular exercises across all three services - SHAKTI, Garuda (8th edition, November 2025), Varuna (March 2025) - plus participation in Milan 2026 and a visit by the French carrier group Charles de Gaulle keep the relationship operationally active year-round.
RAFALE / RAFALE-M SCORPENE
Read brief → 03 CIVIL NUCLEAR ACTIVE
Jaitapur and next-gen reactor cooperation Civil nuclear cooperation is one of the oldest strands of the relationship, with French technical assistance contributing to India's heavy-water production and fast-breeder reactor programme from the early post-independence decades, well before India's own nuclear-power industry had matured - a legacy of France's willingness to work with India on high-technology projects when other Western partners kept their distance.
The centrepiece modern project, the Jaitapur Nuclear Power Plant in Maharashtra, was first agreed in principle in the mid-2000s alongside the broader opening of global civil nuclear commerce with India following the 2008 NSG waiver, though the project's scale (envisaged as one of the world's largest nuclear power complexes using French EPR reactor technology) has meant progress has been slower and more complex than initial timelines suggested, with commercial and technical negotiations continuing for well over a decade.
An India-France Special Task Force on Nuclear Energy, which met twice in 2025, now oversees the Jaitapur project's continued progress, while newer cooperation has opened around next-generation reactor technology: during PM Modi's February 2025 Paris visit, both sides signed a letter of intent on Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) and Advanced Modular Reactors (AMRs), alongside an implementing agreement between India's GCNEP/DAE and France's INSTN/CEA to train nuclear professionals - extending the decades-old technical-training relationship into a new reactor generation.
JAITAPUR SMR/AMR
Read brief → 04 SPACE COOPERATION DEEP
Fifty years of ISRO-CNES partnership Space cooperation between ISRO and its French counterpart CNES dates back to the very inception of the Indian space programme in the 1960s-70s, when France was among the first countries to provide technology, training and personnel support as India built its rocketry and launch-vehicle capabilities essentially from scratch - a foundational relationship that predates almost every other space partnership India has today.
That founding-era cooperation matured over five decades into one of ISRO's most substantive and durable international partnerships, spanning earth observation, space geodesy, human spaceflight support, launch vehicle technology and planetary exploration, formalised through mechanisms including a Strategic Space Dialogue that has now reached its 2nd round (New Delhi, March 2024). Joint scientific missions like the TRISHNA earth-observation satellite continue this long research collaboration, while maritime and space situational awareness cooperation has added a newer security dimension.
The relationship has increasingly moved into commercial territory too: Arianespace and India's NSIL signed a long-term MoU in 2024 to jointly address global satellite-launch demand using both India's LVM-3 and France's Ariane-6 vehicles - a notable evolution from the technology-transfer relationship of the 1960s-70s toward two mature space powers now competing and cooperating simultaneously in the global commercial launch market.
ISRO-CNES TRISHNA
Read brief → 05 TRADE & INVESTMENT DEEP
India's third-largest EU trading partner Commercial ties between India and France stayed relatively modest for decades relative to the depth of the strategic and defence relationship, reflecting both economies' historically protectionist instincts and, for India, the licence-raj constraints that limited foreign trade and investment broadly until 1991.
Trade and investment opened up steadily after India's 1991 liberalisation, with French firms establishing an increasingly dense corporate presence over the following three decades - by the 2020s, 38 of the 40 companies in France's CAC 40 stock index operated in India, concentrated in services, cement, air transport and petroleum/gas. France became India's 11th-largest foreign investor, with cumulative FDI of €10.50 billion (about $12.01 billion) from April 2000 to December 2025, while bilateral trade more than doubled over the preceding decade.
Bilateral trade reached €13.59 billion (about $15.81 billion) in 2025-26, with Indian exports to France at €6.1 billion (about $7.1 billion), making France India's third-largest trading partner within the EU after the Netherlands and Germany. The India-EU Free Trade Agreement, signed 27 January 2026 - a deal India and the EU had pursued in various forms since the mid-2000s before finally concluding it - is expected to give bilateral trade with France a further, more structural boost going forward.
€13.59BN TRADE 11TH LARGEST INVESTOR
Read brief → 06 DIGITAL & INNOVATION ACTIVE
UPI in France, Year of Innovation 2026 Digital cooperation is a genuinely recent addition to the relationship, with no meaningful precedent before India's own Digital Public Infrastructure (UPI, Aadhaar, and related platforms) matured into an internationally exportable model over the course of the 2010s-2020s - a capability that simply didn't exist in the earlier decades of India-France cooperation focused on defence, nuclear and space.
France became one of the first major European countries to adopt India's UPI payment rails, going live in January 2024 at the Eiffel Tower - a symbolically chosen flagship site - before expanding to major retail destinations including Galeries Lafayette and La Vallée Village, giving Indian tourists and residents in France a familiar payments experience while showcasing Indian digital infrastructure to a European audience. The InFraStructures and InFinity platforms have since extended cooperation into broader Digital Public Infrastructure exchange between the two governments.
That momentum culminated in 2026 being declared the India-France Year of Innovation, jointly launched by PM Modi and President Macron in Mumbai in February 2026, establishing an Indo-French Innovation Network spanning AI, cybersecurity, digital art, defence technology and sustainability - explicitly positioning digital and innovation cooperation as a new, fourth pillar alongside the traditional defence, nuclear and space relationship.
UPI IN FRANCE YEAR OF INNOVATION 2026
Read brief → 07 HEALTH & SCIENCE ACTIVE
AI-for-health institute, CEFIPRA research network Scientific cooperation has a formal institutional home dating back nearly four decades: the Indo-French Centre for Promotion of Advanced Research (CEFIPRA), established in 1986, became one of the earliest and longest-running joint research-funding bodies India has with any country, well before similar mechanisms existed with most other Western partners.
CEFIPRA built up a substantial track record over the following decades, including the Raman-Charpak Fellowship (named for the two countries' Nobel laureates C.V. Raman and Georges Charpak, and now supporting over 250 fellows) and the PROWIS programme supporting women scientists specifically. That base expanded further with the Franco-Indian Campus for Life Sciences and Health, launched in 2022 to link 20 top research institutions across both countries in a more structured, health-and-life-sciences-focused network.
The relationship's newest and most prominent addition came via a 2024 Declaration of Intent on health cooperation, which led to an Indo-French AI-in-global-health institute at AIIMS Delhi, inaugurated February 2026 in partnership with Sorbonne University and the Paris Brain Institute - applying decades of accumulated bilateral research infrastructure to the newest frontier of AI-driven healthcare.
AIIMS-SORBONNE AI HEALTH CEFIPRA
Read brief → 08 EDUCATION & CULTURE ACTIVE
10,000 students, target of 30,000 by 2030 Cultural and educational exchange has historically been a smaller strand of the India-France relationship than defence, nuclear or space cooperation, held back for decades by practical friction points - most notably restrictive visa rules and a language barrier, since French higher education traditionally required French-language proficiency in ways that English-medium destinations like the UK, US or Australia did not.
That began changing meaningfully only from the 2010s-2020s, as French institutions expanded English-taught programmes (particularly in business management) and both governments worked to ease mobility: a five-year Schengen visa scheme, introduced in 2023 specifically for Indian students and professionals, addressed the visa friction directly and coincided with a marked rise in Indian student numbers. Cultural diplomacy scaled up in parallel, with the large-scale Namaste France festival (2023 edition at La Seine Musicale featuring 18 concerts and 16 workshops) marking a significant step up from more modest earlier cultural programming.
About 10,000 Indian students now study in France, mostly in business management, with both governments targeting 30,000 by 2030 - a threefold increase reflecting how recently this pillar has begun to catch up with the rest of the relationship. India's Swami Vivekananda Cultural Centre opened in Paris in March 2026, giving cultural diplomacy a dedicated institutional home for the first time, and the next Namaste France edition is planned for 2028 to mark 30 years of the strategic partnership.
10K STUDENTS SVCC PARIS
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