At the European Council summit held at Brussels during December 14-15, 2017, the EU leaders formally approved negotiating guidelines to move to the second phase of Brexit negotiations after confirming “sufficient progress” had been achieved in the first phase of negotiations. On December 8, the UK and the European Union reached a withdrawal deal concerning three key issues – citizens’ rights, the Northern Irish border and the payment of what Britain owes the European Union (the “divorce bill”).

After failing…

After months of dilly-dallying on negotiating the Brexit deal, Britain is finally leaving the European Union. Last week, the UK and the European Union reached a deal on several contentious issues, thereby paving the way for Brexit negotiations to move on to a second phase. On December 8, 2017, British Prime Minister Theresa May and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker announced the “breakthrough” at an early morning press conference in Brussels.

In many important ways, the “breakthrough” has laid to…

The 14^th Summit between the European Union (EU) and India was held in Delhi, India on 6^th October 2017. This was a summit that showed signs of the current changes within EU itself coming to bear on its approach with other countries. EU is keen to have an FTA with India as it prepares to lose a member country (after the British exit from EU) in the foreseeable future. Meanwhile, UK is itself eager to have an FTA with…

On August 30, 2017, the Reserve Bank of India released its Annual Report for 2016-17 which revealed that 98.8 percent of scrapped currency notes have come back into the Indian banking system between November 8, 2016 – when the demonetization was announced – and June 30, 2017. This mind-blowing statistics has put a serious question mark over the efficacy of demonetization move because it was anticipated by the government that a large portion of scrapped currency notes…

India played host to the 19th Round of talks for the proposed Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) from 17-28th July 2017. The talks were held in Hyderabad – the state capital of Telangana, over 1,500 kms from the political capital in New Delhi. But the moot question is – are all the States in the country united in their support of the Centre’s push for new rules of ‘free trade’ in this mega-regional free trade agreement (FTA)?

The Kerala…