6 active areas of cooperation, as of 12 May 2026. Click any card for the full brief.
01 TRADE DEEP
CEPA concluded in record time Commercial ties between India and the UAE predate the modern state itself - the Indian Rupee served as the de facto currency of the Trucial States until 1966, and Indian merchants were woven into Gulf dhow-trade networks for generations before formal diplomatic relations were established in 1972. For four decades trade grew steadily but relations stayed at arm's length, coloured by India's Cold War-era wariness of the UAE's ties to Pakistan.
That changed after PM Modi's landmark 2015 visit - the first by an Indian PM in over three decades - which produced a wave of economic, defence and security agreements, followed by Crown Prince Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed's 2016 visit to India and his role as chief guest at the 2017 Republic Day parade, when ties were elevated to a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership. That platform enabled the two sides to negotiate the India-UAE Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA) in just 88 days - a trade-deal speed record - signing it on 18 February 2022 and bringing it into force on 1 May 2022, covering goods, services and investment with 90% of Indian goods exports entering the UAE duty-free.
Trade has grown steadily since: bilateral trade rose from $72.9 billion (FY2021-22) to $84.5 billion (FY2022-23), a 16% year-on-year increase, with India's exports alone up 12% to $31.3 billion. Both governments have set a target of pushing goods trade past $100 billion and services trade past $15 billion within five years of CEPA's entry into force.
02 ENERGY DEEP
Oil, LNG, and renewables Energy has been the backbone of the relationship since the 1970s oil boom first drew Indian labour to the Gulf, and UAE crude has flowed to Indian refiners for decades under long-term supply contracts.
The relationship deepened structurally in 2018, when India's Strategic Petroleum Reserves Limited (ISPRL) signed an agreement with ADNOC to lease strategic crude-storage capacity in India's underground caverns at Mangalore and Padur (Karnataka) - the first time a foreign national oil company was allowed to store crude in India's strategic reserves, giving the UAE a direct stake in India's energy security and India priority access to that oil during a supply crunch. Renewable cooperation grew in parallel as the UAE positioned itself as a clean-energy diplomacy hub - hosting IRENA's headquarters in Abu Dhabi since 2009 and the COP28 climate summit in 2023 - opening new tracks on solar and green hydrogen alongside the traditional oil trade.
The UAE remains among India's top crude suppliers (fourth-largest in FY2024-25), and during a 2026 visit the two sides announced plans to expand the ADNOC-ISPRL storage arrangement to as much as 30 million barrels, further deepening the strategic-reserve partnership even as India works to diversify its overall crude sourcing.
03 INVESTMENT DEEP
Sovereign wealth flowing into India UAE sovereign investment in India is a more recent phenomenon than the trade and labour relationship, emerging mainly after the 2015-17 strategic upgrade opened the door to large-ticket capital commitments alongside goods trade.
Abu Dhabi's two big sovereign funds became the main vehicles: the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA) and Mubadala Investment Company have separately and jointly backed Indian infrastructure investment trusts, logistics platforms, fintech and renewable-energy portfolios over the past decade, including participation in funds targeting several billion dollars for India-focused infrastructure upgrades.
By 2025, cumulative UAE FDI into India had passed roughly $20 billion, making the UAE the seventh-largest source of FDI into India; sovereign-fund officials have continued signalling further allocations toward India's infrastructure, data-centre and green-energy buildout, with CEPA's investment chapter providing the legal scaffolding for continued growth.
04 PEOPLE-TO-PEOPLE DEEP
3.5 million Indians, largest diaspora The Indian community in the UAE traces directly to the 1970s Gulf oil boom, when high oil production drew large numbers of unskilled and semi-skilled workers from Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh and other states into construction, domestic service and the broader Gulf labour market - building on centuries-older trading links between the two coasts.
That labour migration scaled up continuously through the 1980s-2000s as the UAE's economy diversified beyond oil into construction, retail, hospitality and logistics, with Indians becoming the largest expatriate nationality in the country. As the community grew, welfare cooperation became a formal government-to-government track, covering labour contracts, minimum-wage protections and mechanisms to address grievances for workers in construction and domestic service - sectors most exposed to exploitation risk.
The diaspora now numbers roughly 3.5 million, the largest Indian community anywhere in the world, and remittances from the UAE to India exceeded $18 billion in FY2023-24 - a major and stable source of foreign-exchange inflows for India. Consular services, worker welfare, and diaspora engagement (including India's Pravasi Bharatiya events) remain a standing feature of every high-level bilateral visit.
DIASPORA REMITTANCES
Read brief → 05 TECHNOLOGY GROWING
Digital payments and data centres Digital and technology cooperation is the newest strand of the relationship, building on the payments and remittance corridor that has long connected the two economies through the diaspora.
India's Unified Payments Interface (UPI) went live in the UAE in 2023 - the first Middle Eastern country to adopt it - through a tie-up between NPCI International Payments Ltd and local operator Network International, initially enabling Indian travellers to pay UAE merchants directly via UPI QR codes. The rollout expanded merchant acceptance through 2024-25 alongside broader NPCI International partnerships across the Gulf.
Beyond payments, the UAE has emerged as a growing hub for Indian-linked data centres, cloud infrastructure and AI-compute investment, part of Abu Dhabi and Dubai's push to become regional AI and data hubs; Indian IT and fintech firms have used the UAE as a base for regional expansion, reinforcing the payments integration with broader digital-infrastructure ties.
06 FOOD SECURITY ACTIVE
I2U2 food corridor Food security cooperation grew directly out of the minilateral opening created by the August 2020 Abraham Accords, which normalised UAE-Israel relations and made a four-way India-Israel-UAE-US format possible for the first time.
That format, I2U2, grew from an October 2021 foreign-ministers' call to its first leaders' summit on 14 July 2022, where the UAE pledged $2 billion to develop integrated food parks in India - combining UAE capital, Israeli agri-technology, and Indian land and labour - incorporating climate-smart techniques to cut food waste, conserve water and use renewable energy in the food-processing chain.
Implementation has proceeded park-by-park rather than all at once: sites in Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh have moved fastest, with further locations including Andhra Pradesh flagged for future phases. Progress has been steady but slower than the original 2022 timeline implied, with the broader I2U2 format itself still lacking a standing secretariat even as the food-park initiative remains its most concrete deliverable to date.
I2U2 FOOD PARKS
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