A companion piece on this site already flagged the India-EFTA TEPA's headline $100 billion investment commitment as a general framework, not a sector-specific plan. This piece goes one layer deeper: what does the actual tariff schedule cover, what does India's real trade with Switzerland and Norway look like today, and which categories are genuinely exposed to new import competition versus which are just noise around a number (gold) that TEPA doesn't actually touch.
What TEPA Actually Opens: EFTA Goods, India's Real Numbers, and Where Domestic Manufacturing Needs to Catch Up
What TEPA is, in one paragraph. The India-European Free Trade Association Trade and Economic Partnership Agreement covers Switzerland, Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein, was signed March 2024, and came into force 1 October 2025. It carries a binding $100 billion / 1 million jobs / 15-year investment commitment — the first of its kind in any Indian FTA — alongside a conventional goods-tariff schedule. Most coverage (including a companion piece on this site) has stayed at the investment-commitment level. This piece is about the goods schedule and the real trade numbers behind it.
India's tariff offer to EFTA covers 82.7% of tariff lines, accounting for 95.3% of EFTA's exports to India. EFTA's offer to India is more generous on paper: 92.2% of tariff lines, covering 99.6% of India's exports, including 100% of non-agricultural products and tariff concessions on Processed Agricultural Products. Basmati and non-basmati rice get duty-free EFTA access with no reciprocal concession required from India — a clean, one-sided win.
Elimination isn't uniform or immediate. Per the government's own release, some tariff lines drop to zero the day TEPA takes effect; others phase out over 3, 5, 7 or 10 years, and a further subset defers the start of phase-out to year five. Wine gets a separate, partial schedule. On India's side, the protected list is explicit: dairy, soya, coal, and select agricultural products see no new market access at all.
| Tariff lines covered | Share of partner's exports covered | Non-agri coverage | |
|---|---|---|---|
| India's offer to EFTA | 82.7% | 95.3% of EFTA exports | — |
| EFTA's offer to India | 92.2% | 99.6% of India's exports | 100% |
Source: PIB press releases on TEPA's coming into force (Oct 2025) and the $100bn investment framing, as reported in secondary coverage citing those releases directly (PIB's own pages returned access errors from this piece's research tools; the figures above are corroborated across multiple secondary sources citing the same official release).
Bilateral India-EFTA trade totalled roughly $24.4 billion in FY2024-25 — India exported about $1.96 billion and imported about $22.45 billion, a lopsided deficit "largely driven by gold from Switzerland." Switzerland-specific 2024 figures make the concentration explicit: India's $21.52 billion in imports from Switzerland were roughly 89% pearls, precious stones and gold (~$19.19 billion) alone.
The number that actually matters here: gold's effective duty does not change under TEPA. India's government has stated this explicitly — gold, EFTA's single largest export item to India by a huge margin, sits outside the scope of TEPA's tariff cuts. That means the headline "$22bn+ in imports from EFTA" figure driving most casual coverage of this deal is almost entirely a pre-existing gold-trade flow TEPA doesn't touch, not a new import-competition story. Any "what does TEPA expose India to" analysis that starts from the gross trade numbers without stripping gold out first is measuring the wrong thing.
Independent research from India's own export-import bank reinforces why leaving the gold/gems duty untouched was the right call, rather than an oversight. EXIM Bank of India's own econometric work on exchange-rate pass-through (Occasional Paper No. 228, 2025) classifies gems & jewellery as a "Trade Intensive" sector — high export orientation and high import intensity simultaneously — and finds that for this specific sector, rupee depreciation actually widens the trade deficit rather than narrowing it, because the sector's dependence on imported raw gold and diamonds outweighs any competitiveness gain from a cheaper rupee. Applied to TEPA: even setting the tariff question aside entirely, currency-driven cost pressure in this sector cuts the same direction gold's duty exemption already points — away from treating gems & jewellery as a simple "cheaper imports, cheaper exports" story.
Strip gold out and the picture becomes legible. Switzerland and Norway are EFTA's two trade-significant partners for India by a wide margin — Iceland and Liechtenstein's bilateral volumes are small enough that neither shows up meaningfully in commodity-level breakdowns.
| Flow | Top categories | Approx. value (US$M) |
|---|---|---|
| India imports from Switzerland (ex-gold) | Machinery | 521.8 |
| Clocks & watches | 329.4 | |
| Pharmaceutical products | 155.1 | |
| India exports to Switzerland | Organic chemicals | 597.2 |
| Pearls & precious stones (re-export/cut&polish trade) | 491.6 | |
| Machinery | 65.2 | |
| India imports from Norway | Nickel | 91.6 |
| Iron & steel | 40.3 | |
| Aluminium | 30.5 | |
| Machinery | 25.2 | |
| India exports to Norway | Organic chemicals | 79.3 |
| Milling products, malt, starches | 54.2 | |
| Ships & boats | 32.8 |
Sources: Trading Economics (India-Norway series) and secondary compilations of Swiss customs/DGCI&S-derived bilateral data, 2024 figures, cross-checked across two independent aggregators. EFTA-wide (Eurostat, 2024, euro-denominated) commodity flows corroborate the same pattern: EFTA's top exports to India are machinery (€506.9M), watches (€288M), medical instruments (€270.6M), electrical machinery (€248.5M) and pharmaceuticals (€238.4M); India's top exports to EFTA are organic chemicals (€955.9M), electrical machinery (€290.7M) and woven apparel (€246M). TradeStat and PIB were both unreachable from this piece's research tools at the time of writing; figures here are corroborated across independent secondary sources rather than pulled directly from the primary portal, and should be treated accordingly.
Norway is the EFTA partner that doesn't fit the Switzerland pattern at all. There's no gold concentration distorting the numbers, and the deficit — while real — is an order of magnitude smaller: India's full-2024 exports to Norway ran roughly $424 million against imports of roughly $934 million, a ~$510 million gap versus Switzerland's ~$20 billion one. More recent single-month data (April 2026 alone) shows both sides growing — exports up 17.3% to $50 million, imports up 8.2% to $85.3 million — suggesting the gap may be narrowing slightly, though a single month of data isn't enough to call that a trend.
The commodity mix is also genuinely two-way in a way Switzerland's isn't. India sells Norway organic chemicals, milling products (malt, starches), ships and boats, and machinery; Norway sells India mineral fuels and oils, nickel, fertilisers, iron and steel, and ships and boats. The fertiliser line is worth flagging on its own: Norway is home to Yara, one of the world's largest nitrogen-fertiliser producers, already named in this site's CBAM/EFTA piece as sitting under TEPA's $100bn investment-eligibility framework (without a confirmed pledge) — and Norwegian fertiliser imports connect directly to the soil-nutrient and urea-dependency story covered in "Nature Versus Nurture" on this site. A TEPA-linked Yara investment in India, if it ever materialises, would be a fertiliser-import relationship turning into a fertiliser-production one.
The salmon number that captures the whole relationship. Norway's seafood industry is watching TEPA closely — zero tariffs on salmon are now on the horizon — but the Norwegian Seafood Council's own framing is blunt: India "represents a market that has to be built almost from scratch." One concrete comparison makes the point: Norway sold roughly 52,000 tonnes of salmon to China this year, versus about 200 tonnes to India — a 260-to-1 gap. TEPA removes the tariff barrier; it does nothing about the cold-chain infrastructure, distribution and consumer-habit gap that actually explains why the volume isn't there yet. That is the honest state of most of the "needs domestic manufacturing support" and "needs market-building support" categories in this piece: the trade agreement clears a legal obstacle, not the practical ones sitting behind it.
Putting the tariff-commitment structure (Section 1) against the actual trade flows (Section 3) sorts the goods into three genuinely different buckets — a distinction the gross trade numbers alone don't make.
| Category | Bucket | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Gold, pearls, precious stones | Non-issue (excluded) | Duty unchanged — the dominant trade value by far, but not a TEPA exposure at all |
| Organic chemicals | High-priority export opportunity | Already India's top export to both Switzerland and Norway; EFTA's 99.6%-of-exports coverage extends duty-free access further — the clearest growth lever in this deal |
| Basmati/non-basmati rice | High-priority export opportunity | Duty-free EFTA access with no reciprocal Indian concession — a clean win worth actively marketing to exporters |
| Watches & clocks (Swiss) | Needs domestic manufacturing support | $329M+ import category with essentially no comparable Indian manufacturing base (movements, precision components); tariff cuts widen an already-large gap rather than opening a contestable market |
| Precision/industrial machinery (Swiss + Norwegian) | Needs domestic manufacturing support | $547M+ combined import value; India's capital-goods sector is strong in some segments but thin in the high-precision Swiss/Nordic specialisms being liberalised |
| Medical instruments | Needs domestic manufacturing support (already underway) | €270.6M EFTA-wide export category to India; directly overlaps the PLI-for-medical-devices push covered in an earlier piece on this site — TEPA increases the case for that PLI programme to actually scale, not a new problem |
| Pharmaceuticals (Swiss) | Needs domestic manufacturing support, narrowly | India is globally dominant in generics; the $155M+ Swiss import flow is concentrated in patented/innovator and complex-biologic segments where India's strength doesn't apply — the exposure is real but narrow, not a threat to the generics industry |
| Nickel, iron & steel, aluminium (Norwegian) | Low priority / net input benefit | These are manufacturing inputs, not finished-goods competition — cheaper Norwegian metals via TEPA likely help downstream Indian manufacturers more than they hurt any domestic producer |
| Dairy, soya, coal, select agri products | Explicitly protected | India kept these off the table entirely — no exposure by design, not by market outcome |
The companion piece on this site already established that TEPA's $100bn/1M-jobs/15-year investment framework spans broad sectors — offshore wind, hydrogen, autonomous shipping, aquaculture, data centres, plus a wider FDI list covering infrastructure, manufacturing, machinery, pharmaceuticals, chemicals and food processing — without a public breakdown of how much goes where. Reading that alongside this piece's goods analysis suggests the more useful framing: the investment commitment is the mechanism most likely to actually close the "needs domestic manufacturing support" gaps identified above (precision machinery, medical instruments, specialty pharma capability) if it materialises in those sectors specifically, rather than the tariff schedule itself, which mostly just describes what becomes cheaper to import. Nothing in the sources gathered for either piece confirms that earmarking exists yet.
What this piece does not establish. This analysis works from secondary trade-data aggregators (Trading Economics, Eurostat-derived compilations, OEC) rather than a direct DGCI&S TradeStat pull, because both tradestat.commerce.gov.in and pib.gov.in returned access errors from this piece's research tools at the time of writing. The figures are corroborated across multiple independent sources and internally consistent (Swiss-specific and EFTA-wide numbers tell the same story), but a reader relying on this for a sourcing/compliance decision should verify the exact HS-line-level tariff schedule against the EFTA/India TEPA's own published Annexes 2.C–2.F rather than this summary.
About this article: Researched, written and edited by Umashankar Triplicane Dwarakanathan, with AI research assistance; every figure is meant to trace to the primary source cited. See the Editorial Policy for how sourcing, AI use and corrections work.
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