Groupings, treaties, chokepoints and doctrines behind India's foreign policy news. 561 concepts, each with its definition, key details and a timeline of every news story that touched it.
A Free Trade Agreement (FTA) is a deal between two or more countries to remove or sharply cut import taxes (tariffs) on most of the goods they trade with...
The India-US Bilateral Trade Agreement (BTA) is a trade deal that India and the United States are negotiating with each other. Its aim is simple: make it...
BRICS is a group of major emerging economies that meet every year to work together on the world economy, trade, finance and global governance. The name...
Section 301 is a law inside the United States' Trade Act of 1974. It gives the US government a legal tool to investigate other countries' trade practices...
The International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, is a United States law passed in 1977. It allows the US President to control economic dealings...
Foreign Direct Investment, or FDI, is money that a foreign company or person puts into a business in another country to own a lasting share in it and have a...
Section 232 is a part of a United States law called the Trade Expansion Act of 1962. It lets the US President put tariffs or limits on imports if the...
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is the main world treaty on climate change. It was agreed in 1992, and almost every...
A non-tariff barrier (NTB) is any trade hurdle, other than an import tax, that makes it harder or costlier to sell goods in another country. Examples are...
A Double Taxation Avoidance Agreement, or DTAA, is a treaty between two countries that decides which country gets to tax which income. Without it, a person...
The India-US Comprehensive Global Strategic Partnership (CGSP) is the official name for the overall relationship between India and the United States. It...
The Principal Purpose Test (PPT) is a rule written into tax treaties to stop people from misusing them. It says: if it is reasonable to conclude that...
Adaptation finance is money spent to help people, farms, cities and nature cope with the effects of climate change that are already happening or can no...
The SHG-Bank Linkage Programme (SHG-BLP) is India's system for connecting small groups of poor people, called Self-Help Groups, with formal banks. A...
Treaty-making power is the power of a country to enter into binding agreements with other countries, such as trade deals, border agreements, tax treaties...
The fiscal multiplier tells us how much a country's total output (GDP) rises when the government spends one extra rupee, or how much it falls when the...
Strategic autonomy means that India makes its own foreign policy decisions based on its own national interest. It does not let any single big power or...
India and Canada are both democracies, members of the Commonwealth and the G20, and share deep people-to-people ties through one of the largest Indian...
The SHANTI Act, 2025 is India's new main law for nuclear energy. SHANTI stands for Sustainable Harnessing and Advancement of Nuclear Energy for Transforming...
The Quad, or Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, is a group of four democracies: India, the United States, Japan and Australia. The four countries meet...
The Unified Payments Interface, or UPI, is an Indian system that lets you send money from one bank account to another instantly, using just a mobile phone....
The Line of Actual Control, or LAC, is the line that separates the areas held by India from the areas held by China. It is not a border that both countries...
Trade remedies are special, temporary import duties or limits that WTO rules allow a country to use to protect its own industry from harmful imports. There...
The India-UK Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement, or CETA, is a free trade agreement between India and the United Kingdom. It removes or cuts import...
The Act East Policy is India's plan to build strong ties with the countries to its east: Southeast Asia (especially ASEAN), East Asia (like Japan and South...
India's trade deficit with China is the gap between what India buys from China and what it sells to China. India imports a huge amount of goods from China...
SAGAR stands for Security and Growth for All in the Region. It is India's guiding idea for how it deals with its neighbours in the Indian Ocean Region. The...
ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, is a regional group of 11 countries in Southeast Asia. Its members work together on trade, security...
The General Anti-Avoidance Rule (GAAR) is a part of India's income tax law that lets the tax department ignore or recast a deal whose main purpose is to...
The Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) is a group of 48 countries that supply nuclear materials and technology. They follow a common set of rules (called...
The General Agreement on Trade in Services, or GATS, is the World Trade Organization's (WTO) rulebook for trade in services. Services are things you cannot...
Comparative advantage is the most important idea in the theory of international trade. It says that a country gains most by producing and exporting the...
Rules of origin are the tests a country uses to decide where a product 'comes from', that is, its economic nationality. This matters because a trade deal...
BIMSTEC is a regional group of seven countries around the Bay of Bengal: Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Thailand. Its aim is to...
The Financial Action Task Force, or FATF, is an international body that sets the global rules for stopping money laundering (making dirty money look clean)...
Confidence-building measures, or CBMs, are agreed rules and habits that two rival countries follow so that small incidents on the border do not turn into...
India-US energy cooperation is the partnership between the two countries to trade fuels, share clean-energy technology and invest in each other's energy...
The Special Representatives (SR) mechanism is the highest-level channel through which India and China talk about settling their disputed boundary. Each...
The C5+1 is a meeting format in which the five Central Asian countries ('C5') sit together with one outside country ('+1'), which is the United States. The...
The UNSC 1267 Sanctions Committee is a committee of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) that keeps a list of terrorists and terror groups linked to...
The Gulf Cooperation Council, or GCC, is a regional group of six Arab countries on the Arabian Peninsula: Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE)...
Common but Differentiated Responsibilities and Respective Capabilities, or CBDR-RC, is a basic principle of global climate law. It says that all countries...
A tariff-rate quota, or TRQ, is a two-level import tax. A country lets a fixed quantity of a product come in at a low tax (the in-quota rate). Anything...
The Global Stocktake (GST) is a five-yearly check-up of the whole world's progress on climate change under the Paris Agreement. It looks at the total effort...
The Eurasian Economic Union, or EAEU, is a group of five countries from the former Soviet Union that have joined their economies together. The members are...
The FTA utilisation rate tells us what share of eligible trade actually uses the lower tariffs promised in a free trade agreement (FTA). Signing a trade...
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, is the United Nations body that assesses the science of climate change. It does not do its own...
The Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, or CBAM, is a rule of the European Union (EU). It puts a charge on the carbon pollution that was released while...
Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), also called the Pakistani Taliban, is a banned armed group that fights against the government of Pakistan. It was formed in...
A Positive Indigenisation List (PIL) is an official list of defence items that India's armed forces and defence companies must buy only from Indian makers...
India and France have one of the oldest and closest space partnerships in the world. India's space agency ISRO and France's space agency CNES (Centre...
There are two main ways to set a goal for cutting greenhouse gases. An absolute target caps the total amount of gas a country or industry releases, for...
The fishermen issue is the long-running problem of Indian fishermen, mostly from Tamil Nadu, crossing the sea boundary into Sri Lankan waters to fish, and...
Katchatheevu is a small, uninhabited island of about 285 acres in the Palk Strait, the narrow stretch of sea between Tamil Nadu and northern Sri Lanka. It...
Every object that is warm gives off invisible heat rays called infrared radiation. The warmer the object, the more it gives off. Thermal infrared remote...
The Balance of Payments, or BoP, is a record of all money that flows between India and the rest of the world over a period, usually a quarter or a year. It...
The WTO dispute settlement mechanism is the system the World Trade Organization uses to settle trade fights between its member countries. When one country...
The World Trade Organization, or WTO, is the only global body that makes and enforces rules for trade between countries. Its members agree on rules such as...
India's nuclear doctrine is the official set of rules on why India keeps nuclear weapons and when it would use them. Its heart is two ideas. No First Use...
The United Nations General Assembly, or UNGA, is the main meeting place of the United Nations where every member country has a seat and one vote. Today it...