6 active areas of cooperation, as of 31 May 2026. Click any card for the full brief.
01 STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIP COUNCIL DEEP
Institutionalised leader-level steering mechanism Diplomatic relations were established in 1947, but for decades the relationship stayed largely transactional - centred on labour migration and Hajj facilitation - without the kind of high-level strategic architecture India built with other major partners, reflecting Saudi Arabia's traditional foreign-policy focus on the Arab world and its Western security alliances rather than South Asia.
That began changing decisively with King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud's landmark January 2006 visit to India - producing the 'Delhi Declaration,' the first framework document of its kind between the two countries - followed by the 'Riyadh Declaration' in 2010 during PM Manmohan Singh's visit, which formally elevated ties to a Strategic Partnership. The Strategic Partnership Council, established in October 2019 as a dedicated leader-level steering mechanism, held its inaugural Leaders' Meeting during Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's September 2023 India visit for the G20 Summit, producing eight MoUs.
Momentum has accelerated further since: the SPC's 2nd Leaders' Meeting, during PM Modi's April 2025 State visit to Jeddah, expanded the mechanism into four dedicated Ministerial Committees and secured agreement to collaborate on two oil refineries in India; nearly 35 ministerial or senior-official interactions took place in 2025 alone, and a Saudi-India Parliamentary Friendship Group was constituted by the Indian Parliament in February 2026 - a pace of institution-building that has compressed what might have taken decades elsewhere into less than twenty years since the 2006 Delhi Declaration.
2ND SPC LEADERS' MEETING 4 MINISTERIAL COMMITTEES
Read brief → 02 TRADE & INVESTMENT DEEP
5th-largest trade partner, $10bn in Saudi investment Trade between India and Saudi Arabia has centuries-old roots in pre-modern maritime commerce across the Arabian Sea, but the modern relationship was built almost entirely around oil from the mid-20th century onward, with investment and diversified trade remaining a distant second priority for decades relative to the crude-oil relationship.
That began broadening only after the 2006 Delhi Declaration and 2010 Strategic Partnership elevation, as Saudi Arabia's own economic diversification push - later formalised as Vision 2030 - opened space for non-oil trade and two-way investment to grow alongside the traditional energy relationship. Saudi investment vehicles including the Public Investment Fund (PIF), ARAMCO, SABIC, SALIC and others built a cumulative Saudi investment position in India of about $10 billion, while over 6,000 Indian companies established a presence in the Kingdom, growing Indian investment there to roughly $3 billion - formalised through a High-Level Task Force on Investment that has met twice (July 2024, April 2025).
Bilateral trade reached $41.88 billion in FY2024-25 (exports $11.76 billion, imports $30.12 billion, still dominated by crude oil), making India Saudi Arabia's second-largest trading partner and Saudi Arabia India's fifth-largest - a relationship that has genuinely diversified over the past two decades even as oil remains its single largest component by value.
$41.88BN TRADE $10BN SAUDI INVESTMENT
Read brief → 03 ENERGY PARTNERSHIP DEEP
13.6% of India's crude oil imports Energy has been the structural backbone of the relationship since Saudi Arabia's oil industry began scaling up commercially in the mid-20th century, well before either country's current diplomatic architecture existed - India's industrialisation from the 1950s onward created steadily rising demand that Saudi Arabia, with the world's largest proven conventional oil reserves, was well placed to meet.
That simple buyer-seller relationship persisted largely unchanged for decades, surviving fluctuations in bilateral political engagement precisely because energy trade operated on its own commercial logic largely insulated from the broader relationship's ebbs and flows. Only from the 2020s has the relationship begun evolving beyond pure crude supply: the two governments agreed during PM Modi's April 2025 Jeddah visit to collaborate on two oil refineries in India, marking a shift toward joint downstream investment rather than Saudi Arabia functioning purely as an upstream crude exporter.
India imported 33.14 million metric tonnes of crude oil from Saudi Arabia in FY2024-25 (13.58% of India's total crude imports) and 3.34 million tonnes of LPG (14.99% of total LPG imports) - underscoring that even as the relationship diversifies into refining, defence and technology, Saudi Arabia's role as one of India's two or three most important crude suppliers remains the single most consequential fact about the relationship.
33.14 MMT CRUDE TWO NEW REFINERIES
Read brief → 04 DEFENCE PARTNERSHIP ACTIVE
Growing from dormant to active cooperation Defence cooperation was essentially dormant for most of the relationship's history, reflecting Saudi Arabia's traditional reliance on US and Western security guarantees and India's own historic focus on other defence-procurement partners (chiefly the Soviet Union/Russia) rather than Gulf Arab states, leaving a notable 12-year gap in ministerial-level defence visits between the two countries.
That gap finally ended with Minister of State Ajay Bhatt's February 2024 Riyadh visit, which included a $225 million India-to-Saudi ammunition export deal - itself a notable role reversal, with India exporting defence equipment to a traditional arms-importing power rather than the other way around. Momentum built quickly from there: the bilateral naval exercise 'Al Mohed Al Hindi' had already run twice (2021, 2023) as an early confidence-building measure, and the first bilateral Land Force Exercise, 'Ex-Sada Tanseeq-I,' was held in Rajasthan in 2024.
A dedicated Ministerial Committee on Defence Cooperation, announced in April 2025 as part of the wider Strategic Partnership Council expansion, has since anchored rapid institutionalisation: the 7th Joint Committee on Defence Cooperation met in New Delhi in August 2025, inaugural Navy and Army Staff Talks were held the same year, and the Saudi Chief of General Staff made his first-ever visit to India in December 2025 - taking defence ties from a 12-year hiatus to a fully institutionalised, multi-service relationship within roughly two years.
$225M AMMO DEAL AL MOHED AL HINDI
Read brief → 05 CULTURAL RELATIONS ACTIVE
Yoga diplomacy and diaspora festivals under Vision 2030 Cultural exchange between India and Saudi Arabia was historically constrained by the Kingdom's conservative social policies, which for decades left limited space for public cultural programming, festivals, or even recreational activities like organised sport and music in the way both countries now pursue - a stark contrast to the openly promoted cultural diplomacy India runs with most other major partners.
That changed fundamentally only after Saudi Arabia launched Vision 2030 in 2016, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's sweeping social and economic reform programme, which explicitly opened space for public entertainment, tourism and cultural exchange as part of a broader diversification away from oil dependence. India moved quickly to build cultural cooperation into this newly available space: Yoga was officially recognised as a sport in the Kingdom under a 2021 MoU - itself a notable marker of social change - and a Saudi instructor led the common yoga protocol for International Day of Yoga 2024, a symbolic first.
That opening has since scaled into full-fledged festival diplomacy: a Ministerial Committee on Tourism and Cultural Cooperation, announced in April 2025, and a bilateral Cultural Cooperation MoU signed in Riyadh in November 2025 formalised the relationship, while the 3rd Pravasi Parichay festival (Riyadh, October-November 2025) drew over 1,000 artists from 20 Indian states, including a 'Gita Mahotsav' musical drama PM Modi referenced in his Mann Ki Baat broadcast - a scale of cultural programming unthinkable in the Kingdom just a decade earlier.
VISION 2030 ALIGNMENT YOGA AS RECOGNISED SPORT
Read brief → 06 DIASPORA, LABOUR & HAJJ DEEP
2.74 million-strong community, 175,025 Hajj quota Indian pilgrimage to Mecca for Hajj predates the modern Saudi state itself by centuries, making it one of the oldest continuous people-to-people connections in either country's history, while large-scale labour migration is a more recent but equally foundational thread: Indians began moving to the oil-rich Gulf, including Saudi Arabia, in significant numbers from the late 1970s onward as the region's oil wealth created enormous demand for construction, domestic and service-sector labour.
That labour relationship has operated for decades under Saudi Arabia's kafala sponsorship system, which ties a migrant worker's legal status to a single employer - a structure that has generated persistent, well-documented concerns about limited labour rights, wage disputes and inadequate legal recourse for Indian workers, and has periodically strained bilateral engagement even as remittance flows from the Kingdom remain among the largest sources of foreign exchange India receives from anywhere. Bilateral worker-protection agreements from 2014 and 2016 addressed specific worker categories, followed by a 2022 Skill Verification Program agreement between India's NSDC and Saudi Arabia's Takamol Holding aimed at improving skills-matching and worker protections.
The Indian community now numbers about 2.74 million, and Hajj arrangements - digitised in recent years via a dedicated mobile app, the e-MASIHA health facility and e-luggage pre-tagging - now bring 175,025 Indian pilgrims annually under the negotiated Hajj quota, alongside an average 1.5 million Indians performing Umrah each year, making Saudi Arabia host to one of the largest annual religious-travel flows anywhere in India's diplomatic relationships.
2.74M DIASPORA 175,025 HAJJ QUOTA
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