7 active areas of cooperation, as of July 2025. Click any card for the full brief.
01 TRADE & THE FTA DEEP
Comprehensive 26-chapter Free Trade Agreement Trade between the two countries is as old as the colonial relationship itself, but a modern free-trade framework was attempted only from 2021, when PM Boris Johnson and PM Modi agreed an 'Enhanced Trade Partnership' at a virtual summit in May 2021, setting an intention to negotiate a full FTA rather than jumping straight to one.
Formal negotiations launched in January 2022, and Johnson set an ambitious Diwali 2022 deadline for conclusion - a target that collapsed amid the UK's own political turmoil that autumn (three Prime Ministers in as many months) and was formally abandoned by October 2022 in favour of prioritising deal quality over speed. Talks dragged through 13 rounds by December 2023, an attempt to fast-track before both countries' 2024 elections, then stalled again before being picked up by the incoming Labour government under PM Keir Starmer after his July 2024 election win.
Modi and Starmer finally announced the FTA's conclusion on 6 May 2025 - one of India's most comprehensive trade pacts, with 26 chapters spanning goods, services, rules of origin, IPR, government procurement, digital trade, telecom, financial services, environment and labour, alongside a Double Contribution Convention on social security. The agreement was formally signed 24 July 2025 and is set to enter into force 15 July 2026, more than five years after the original 2021 enhanced-partnership commitment. Bilateral trade in goods and services stood at around £43 billion in 2024 (£18bn goods, £25bn services), with UK imports from India around £26bn and exports to India around £17bn.
FTA CONCLUDED MAY 2025 26 CHAPTERS
Read brief → 02 INVESTMENT DEEP
6th-largest investor, dense corporate presence Investment ties trace to British commercial interests established during the colonial era, which left a residue of UK corporate presence in India (banking, insurance, tea, engineering) that survived independence in 1947 even as much of the broader economic relationship was reshaped by India's post-independence licence-raj policies limiting foreign investment for decades.
Investment flows opened up substantially only after India's 1991 liberalisation, with British firms among the first major Western investors to re-enter at scale; formal institutional architecture followed with the Joint Economic and Trade Committee (JETCO), established in 2005, providing a standing forum for trade and investment issues. Indian outward investment into the UK grew into a distinct and increasingly significant flow of its own from the 2000s-2010s, led by high-profile acquisitions (including Tata's purchase of Jaguar Land Rover and Corus Steel) that made Indian companies major UK employers in their own right, not just recipients of British capital.
The UK is now India's 6th-largest inward investor, with cumulative equity investment of $35 billion to September 2024, while India's outward investment into the UK stands at $19 billion (to March 2024); 971 Indian companies operate in the UK employing over 100,000 people, and 667 British companies operate in India employing over 500,000 - a genuinely two-way investment relationship, reinforced by JETCO and the Economic and Financial Dialogue (13th round held April 2025 in London).
$35BN UK FDI 971 INDIAN FIRMS IN UK
Read brief → 03 DEFENCE COOPERATION ACTIVE
Joint exercises across all three services Defence ties date to shared institutional roots in the British Indian Army, which supplied millions of soldiers to British forces in both World Wars before independence in 1947 split the force between India and Pakistan - a legacy still visible in shared regimental traditions, training methods and English as a working military language.
Formal post-independence defence cooperation stayed relatively limited for decades as India built its own non-aligned defence-procurement relationships (chiefly with the Soviet Union), picking up again gradually from the 2000s as India diversified suppliers and the UK sought a larger defence-industrial and exercise footprint in the Indo-Pacific. The naval exercise Konkan, held annually in the Arabian Sea, and the army exercise Ajeya Warrior (Salisbury Plain, 7th edition held April-May 2023) became the anchor recurring engagements, while the air force exercise Cobra Warrior (RAF Waddington, March 2023) added an aviation dimension.
Tarang Shakti 2024 marked a further step, with the RAF participating alongside France, Germany and Spain in a genuinely multinational exercise hosted by India - part of a broader UK push for Make in India defence-industrial cooperation and technology transfer, alongside continued subject-matter-expert exchanges and port calls that keep the relationship active between major exercise cycles.
EX KONKAN EX AJEYA WARRIOR
Read brief → 04 SCIENCE, TECH & INNOVATION DEEP
UK is India's second-largest research partner Scientific exchange between India and Britain has a long institutional history running through colonial-era scientific societies and continuing via Commonwealth academic ties after 1947, but a dedicated modern funding architecture emerged only from the 2010s, as both governments sought to formalise what had long been informal academic collaboration.
The Newton-Bhabha Fund, launched in the mid-2010s as part of the UK's wider Newton Fund programme, became the first major dedicated joint research-funding vehicle, before being succeeded by the broader International Science Partnership Fund, under which India was named a partner country. The biennial India-UK Science and Innovation Council (SIC) grew alongside this funding architecture into the primary steering mechanism, helping make the UK India's second-largest international research and innovation partner with joint funding of £300-400 million.
The April 2023 SIC session produced an MoU spanning quantum technology, clean energy, pandemic preparedness and AI, and launched the India-UK Net Zero Innovation Virtual Centre focused on industrial decarbonisation and green hydrogen - reflecting a shift from the fund's original broad academic-exchange remit toward more targeted cooperation in frontier and climate technology.
£300-400M RESEARCH FUNDING NET ZERO INNOVATION CENTRE
Read brief → 05 HEALTH DEEP
NHS's Indian workforce and vaccine collaboration Health ties are as old as the NHS itself: Indian doctors have staffed British hospitals since the health service's 1948 founding, recruited actively from the 1960s onward to fill chronic workforce shortages, making Indian-origin medical professionals a foundational part of NHS history rather than a recent addition.
That workforce relationship deepened further during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the AstraZeneca-Serum Institute of India licensing partnership for vaccine manufacturing became one of the most consequential examples of India-UK health cooperation in decades, with the Serum Institute producing vaccine doses at a scale critical to global, not just bilateral, pandemic response. The pandemic also underscored the NHS's continued dependence on Indian healthcare workers, formalised further through a July 2022 framework agreement supporting recruitment and training of nurses and allied health professionals specifically for the NHS.
As of June 2023 NHS statistics, 60,533 of 1.51 million NHS staff are Indian - second only to British staff among all nationalities - including 10,865 Indian doctors and 31,992 Indian nurses, the second-largest nationality group in both categories, a workforce relationship now well into its eighth decade.
NHS WORKFORCE ASTRAZENECA-SII VACCINE
Read brief → 06 EDUCATION & MOBILITY ACTIVE
170,000 Indian students, Young Professionals Scheme Educational ties trace to the colonial era, when a small number of elite Indians travelled to study at British universities (Nehru and Gandhi both studied in the UK), and continued through the Commonwealth scholarship schemes of the post-independence decades, though numbers stayed modest by today's standards for most of the 20th century.
Student mobility scaled up enormously from the 2000s-2010s as Indian outbound higher-education demand boomed globally, though the relationship saw real strain around 2012 when the UK tightened post-study work visa rules, causing a sharp, multi-year drop in Indian student numbers that both governments later worked to reverse. The Migration and Mobility Partnership, signed in May 2021, and the Young Professionals Scheme, announced November 2022 (providing 3,000 two-year visas annually to graduates aged 18-30 from each country), were both explicitly designed to rebuild that lost momentum with clearer, more generous post-study and early-career mobility pathways.
A mutual recognition of academic qualifications MoU, signed July 2022, addressed a related long-standing friction point over UK degrees not always being recognised in India and vice versa. Around 170,000 Indian students now study in the UK, and the University of Southampton's new Gurugram campus - the first foreign university campus permitted under India's 2020 New Education Policy - marks a reversal of the traditional one-way flow, with British universities now beginning to establish a direct physical presence in India itself.
170K STUDENTS YOUNG PROFESSIONALS SCHEME
Read brief → 07 DIASPORA DEEP
1.86 million-strong community, £36.8bn in revenue The Indian diaspora in Britain is one of the oldest and largest anywhere outside South Asia, with roots stretching back to the colonial era - lascars (sailors), students and early professionals settled in Britain from the 19th century onward - before growing dramatically through post-war Commonwealth migration waves from the 1950s-70s, including significant secondary migration of Indian-origin communities expelled from East Africa in the late 1960s-70s.
That community became increasingly economically and politically prominent from the 1980s-2000s onward, moving from first-generation small-business and professional roles into major corporate ownership, culminating symbolically in Rishi Sunak becoming the UK's first Prime Minister of Indian origin in October 2022 - a watershed moment reflecting just how deeply integrated the diaspora had become in British public life.
The community now numbers 1.864 million (2021 Census, about 2.6% of the UK population), including 369,000 Indian passport holders, and has built substantial economic weight: a March 2022 Grant Thornton/FICCI report found over 65,000 Indian-diaspora-owned companies in the UK, with a surveyed subset of 654 firms alone generating combined revenue of £36.84 billion, paying over £1 billion in corporate tax, and creating over 174,000 jobs.
1.86M DIASPORA 65,000+ COMPANIES
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