Remarks by Executive Vice-President Virkkunen and Commissioners Šefčovič and Zaharieva on the EU-India Trade and Technology Council ministerial

Executive Vice-President Virkkunen

Today we held our third Trade and Technology Council with India.

Since 2023, the EU and India have been working together across key areas of Trade and Technology.

We have become key partners for one another, working together across strategic technologies, digital governance, and connectivity.

More than ever, we are seeing the importance of our strategic partnership – whether that be for technology, trade or security.

We are reinforcing our tech sovereignty in a way that is grounded in openness, partnerships and fair competition.

This meeting allows us to put this principle into action:

The EU and India are moving from dialogue to practical cooperation, with concrete follow-up actions across a wide range of topics.

From AI to semiconductors to quantum, digital skills, trust services and 6G.

India hosted this year's AI Impact Summit in New Delhi.

At this summit, nations came together in a declaration to recognise that AI's promise can only truly be delivered when its benefits are shared by humanity, reaffirming our commitment to strong partnerships on AI.

But our cooperation goes beyond artificial intelligence:

For instance, our recent tech sovereignty package recognised the importance of semiconductors.

Semiconductors travel the world on their manufacturing journey.

This is why we will work with India towards a practical framework on supply-chain early warning and strengthen mutually beneficial collaboration in research and development and capacity building in the semiconductor sector.

Talent is another key priority, as identified in our AI continent action plan.

Earlier this year, we welcomed the launch of the European Legal Gateway Office pilot in India, which supports mobility and information for workers, starting with the ICT sector. It is now fully operational.

We hope to continue to support mobility of these skills professionals.

And looking ahead to other areas, the EU and India will intensify coordination on next-generation telecoms – again, technology that is crucial for our shared competitiveness in a rapidly involving landscape.

We will continue to seek closer alignment on global interoperable standards, including 6G.

And, we will build on the administrative agreement on advanced electronic signatures and seals from January this year.

So that we work towards interoperable and mutually recognised digital trust services, including digital wallets, making it even easier to work with one another.

So our message today is simple: the EU and India are strengthening our forward-looking technology partnership that delivers practical benefits for citizens, businesses and our economies.

I will leave it to Commissioners Zaharieva and Šefčovič and the Indian Ministers to comment on the progress made in the areas of Green and Clean Energy Technologies as well as Trade, Investment and Resilient Value Chains.

But overall, the third Trade and Technology Council meeting underlined the growing ambition of the EU-India strategic partnership.

The emphasis now is on delivery: ministers and Commissioners have tasked the three TTC working groups to take forward these actions as a priority and report regularly on progress.

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Commissioner Šefčovič

Let me complement and start by the TTC meeting we just concluded.

At a time when global economies face unprecedented challenges, our commitment to working together strengthens our collective resilience and readiness to navigate unpredictable global shifts.

The outcome of our work on Trade, Investment and Resilient Value Chains is a clear example of our shared commitment to advance on resilient value chains, market access, multilateral trade affairs, and decarbonisation.

Our discussions this morning focused as well on resolving market access issues.

We have also both reaffirmed our support for the multilateral trading system and World Trade Organisation (WTO) reform.

My good friend and colleague, Minister Piyush Goyal and I had also a bilateral meeting this morning.

We discussed the progress of the work leading to the swift ratification of our Free Trade Agreement that we finalised at the EU-India Summit.

The EU-India FTA is a gamechanger.

By creating a market of almost 2 billion people, the FTA opens the door to tremendous opportunities. It will establish a secure and stable commercial framework that will help us to mitigate the risks associated with the current geopolitical volatility.

Coupled with a comprehensive package of an Investment Protection Agreement and an Agreement on Geographical Indications - on which negotiations should be unblocked - the EU-India economic relationship will skyrocket.

All of these initiatives and agreements underpin and further expand our already strong strategic relationship.

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Commissioner Zaharieva

It's a pleasure to welcome our dear friends, ministers and their team for the third TTC meeting.

I am not going to repeat what was said, but I am going to focus on what we did deliver, because when we met in Delhi half a year ago we agreed that we are going to make these meetings and TTCs really practical and in a format so that our citizens and our businesses can feel and actually understand why we have it.

Since then, we actually agreed to start negotiations talks for Horizon Association of India.

We did set today a quite ambitions agenda, that these talks are launched officially on the 17^th of July and hopefully to be concludes in the beginning of October – so India to be able to associate with Horizon as of beginning of 2027.

That is I think something that will really help us to develop together technologies of the future because we in Europe believe in open science, in scientific freedom, and we believe that we have to cooperate with our trusted partners for the benefits of the two sides of the ocean.

Second, we actually established a new India startup partnership.

The EU and India already have a thriving innovation ecosystem – we both host 500,000 tech startups, so half a million tech startups we host in India and the EU.

What we want to create with these partnership is to connect those deep tech startups, to connect them with our corporations and to help them to develop together technologies of the future, to attract investments, to find clients, to grow and to become global.

Thirdly, as already mentioned is the EU India Innovation Hub. It will focus on technologies for electric vehicles and testing. Actually, our goal is very simple - it is to align our standards. What does it mean - that it will contribute to the free trade agreement. The producers of the two sides of the ocean will be able to access the market easier and faster.

Last but not least, we are also mobilising 60 million to invest in joint research and innovation projects in areas that matter deeply to both Europe and India. This includes waste to renewable hydrogen, battery recycling for electric vehicles and marine plastic pollution.

I think the message we want to deliver today is very clear.

We are not just talking about cooperation we are delivering this cooperation with concrete projects, with concrete investments, step by step.

By doing so, we are doing it for the benefits of our industries, of our competitiveness, of our supply chains, and mainly for our citizens and our young people.