Work in progress

The Union Ministry of Commerce and Industry has released its latest Foreign Trade Policy (FTP23). The last FTP was released in 2015 and was supposed to cover the period till 2020. No successor policy was released, and it was argued that the exigencies of the pandemic, with its enormous effect on world trade, were delaying the design and release of a policy for the next five years. Now that FTP23 has been released, this argument seems less persuasive. There does not seem to be any explicit understanding in the policy of the changes that have been imposed on the world trading system by the pandemic and various other simultaneous phenomena. These include the growth of trade tensions between the US