Export to India
India - complex, vast and growing fast
The world’s fastest growing large economy, with its long-standing trade and cultural links with the UK, India offers British business perhaps the best opportunities of all the emerging BRIC nations. These strong ties enable UK companies to take advantage of the many opportunities available.
British trade with India reached £39 billion in 2024 – it was just £5 billion in 2010. India’s economy currently ranks fifth in the world by GDP, and the country is one of the G-20 major economies. Total GDP is now £2.69 trillion, a figure which is projected to rise rapidly during the rest of this decade. India’s GDP per capita has increased by more than 500% since 2000.
Although India has numerous languages and hundreds of dialects, Hindi is the official language, and English remains a common tongue especially in the world of business. The world’s most populous country, it is home to around 1.44 billion people. Religion remains influential. The majority are Hindus, although Muslims, Buddhists and other faiths make up sizeable minorities in the country.
Despite widespread development India is still largely rural with 70 per cent of people living outside the main 200 towns and cities. Widespread poverty remains.
Although India can be complicated and challenging from a business perspective, this fast-growing market with a rapidly expanding consumer class and therefore cannot be ignored. A few years ago, international business was largely confined to Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore, but it has now spread further afield to such places as Nagpur, Ahmedabad, Chandigarh, Pune, Jaipur and other locations.
In the decades after independence in 1947, India adopted a strictly Socialist approach to economic development, characterised by wide-scale protectionism, public ownership and heavy regulation on the one hand and massive inefficiency and corruption on the other. This produced an annual “Hindu growth rate” of around three per cent. However, for the past 30 years India has undergone a huge liberalisation process shifting it towards a firmly market-based economy. In that time both growth and international trade have increased spectacularly.
India’s service sector accounts for around half of GDP, followed by industry at nearly 26 per cent and agriculture at 17 per cent. Its active labour force is nearly 600 million people. It is the fifteenth largest exporter in the world and the eighth biggest importer.
Please contact our Trade Procedures Team on 0845 034 7200 or email for further information.
