Nine countries account for most of India's merchandise deficit. Several have had a matching scheme for years — and the gap hasn't closed.
Ranks India's FY2025-26 bilateral trade balance by partner country to find where its forex is actually being spent, then traces the policy history behind the five biggest deficit relationships back several years — not just the last six months — to see whether sustained attention has actually narrowed each gap.
Bilateral trade balance by country, FY2025-26
38 countries with both export and import figures available; ranked by balance.
China alone accounts for a -$112.2bn bilateral deficit — more than double the next-largest. Russia is the fastest-moving entry on this list: a market-driven reorientation, not a formal scheme, took Russian oil from roughly 2.5% of India's crude imports before 2022 to 35.8–35.9% in each of the last two fiscal years, making it India's #2 deficit country from a near-zero starting point four years ago. UAE and Switzerland are dominated by gold/rough-diamond bullion flows tied to the gems & jewellery re-export trade (UAE's import mix is roughly split evenly with mineral fuels too — see the commodity breakdown below), not manufacturing import dependency. Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Thailand round out the top ten — palm oil, and machinery/electronics respectively.
View all 38 countries with export, import and balance figures
Validating this against TRADESTAT's own country×commodity data
HS-2-digit chapters, FY2025-26, direct from the Commerce Ministry's TRADESTAT database.
The country totals above came from the TIA Portal dashboard. To check what's actually inside each number, this section pulls TRADESTAT's own country-wise, all-commodities report for the four countries that anchor this bulletin's argument — China, Russia, UAE, and the USA (as the one large surplus for comparison) — at 2-digit HS level. The two independent Commerce Ministry sources agree almost to the decimal: TRADESTAT's own chapter totals sum to $19,471.1M / $131,633.3M for China's exports/imports, against the TIA Portal's $19,471.1M / $131,633.4M — the same cross-check this repo ran on the aggregate trade-balance numbers earlier, now holding at the country level too.
China's import composition confirms the industrial-input reading, not a consumer-goods one: electrical machinery (HS85, $46.4bn) and mechanical machinery (HS84, $29.5bn) alone are 58% of everything India imports from China — components and capital goods that feed India's own manufacturing and export lines, not finished goods for Indian shoppers. Russia confirms the single-commodity story even more starkly: mineral fuels (HS27) are 86% of all Russian imports into India. One new find worth flagging: Russia is also a fast-growing fertiliser supplier (HS31, $3.12bn, +69.5%) — a second link back to this repo's fertiliser-price bulletin. UAE is a more even split than this bulletin first suggested: gems & pearls (HS71, $24.8bn) and mineral fuels (HS27, $24.3bn) are almost exactly tied, together 77% of UAE imports — not "almost entirely gold," as an earlier pass through this data implied, but gold and petroleum in roughly equal measure. The USA comparison shows the other side of the China story: India's exports to the US are led by the same chapter, electrical machinery (HS85, $25.7bn, +61.5% growth) — consistent with a pattern where China supplies the components India assembles into finished electronics it then exports to the US.
View top 8 import/export chapters for all four countries
The policy history behind the five biggest deficits
Multi-year history, not the last six months.
A note on visualization, and where this data could go next
This bulletin was prompted in part by a look at the Commerce Ministry's own NIRYAT portal (niryat.gov.in) for visualization ideas. Direct access was blocked at the network level — the same TLS-level bot protection this repo has run into before on DGFT-family domains — so the description here relies on the portal's own public documentation rather than a first-hand screenshot. NIRYAT is built around a World Map view alongside Commodity and Table views, with color-coded, traffic-light-style indicators tracking each commodity/country pair against defined targets, plus a district-level geospatial drill-down for state export hubs. That target-vs-actual framing is a genuinely good idea this bulletin doesn't fully adopt — the diverging bar chart above ranks where the deficit sits, but doesn't score whether each relationship is "on track" against an explicit government target the way NIRYAT's traffic-light system does. A future version of this analysis could reasonably borrow that pattern for the timeline entries below.
- niryat.gov.in could not be accessed directly for this bulletin — both the Browser tool and a direct HTTPS request were rejected at the TLS handshake stage. The description of its features above is reconstructed from public secondary sources (its own about-page copy as indexed by search, and third-party writeups), not a first-hand inspection — treat it as directionally reliable, not verified pixel-for-pixel.
- Country-level export and import figures cover 38 of the roughly 217 trading partners in the Commerce Ministry's own portal — specifically, the subset where this repo had already captured both an export and an import figure from an earlier FY2025-26 pull. Several large partners (e.g. Hong Kong) may be under- or mis-represented if they didn't appear in both of the original captures; nothing in the top 15 deficit or top 8 surplus lists is affected, since those countries all had solid figures on both sides.
- "Coverage" and "on track" are different questions. The electrical-machinery chapter (China's primary link into this bulletin) was rated "Strong" policy coverage in this repo's companion gap-analysis bulletin, based on the existence of ISM 2.0 and PLI electronics tracks. This bulletin's longer history check complicates that: independent reporting six years into Atmanirbhar Bharat states plainly that it "has not reduced structural import dependence," and China still supplies an estimated 62% of India's electronic components. A scheme existing, even a well-funded one, is not the same as the import gap actually closing.
- The Russia shift is market economics, not a named scheme — discounted crude plus a payment workaround (settling through UAE dirhams via Emirati traders) rather than a Cabinet-approved policy, which is why it doesn't appear on the companion gap-analysis bulletin's scheme matrix at all. It's included here because it's the single fastest-moving driver of India's country-level deficit list in this window.
- The country×commodity breakdown covers 4 of the 38 countries in this bulletin (China, Russia, UAE, USA) — the ones anchoring the main argument — pulled directly from TRADESTAT's "Country-wise, all commodities" report at 2-digit HS level, US$ million, FY2025-26. Same session, method, and CSRF/cookie-jar workaround as this repo's other TRADESTAT-sourced bulletins.
- Underlying data: data/country_trade_deficit_and_policy_history_2026-07-18.json (country balances, policy timeline) and data/country_commodity_breakdown_2026-07-18.json (TRADESTAT country×commodity validation).
AI Disclosure: This article was researched and written with AI assistance (Claude Sonnet), drawing on publicly available government, industry, and academic sources cited above. AI-generated text can occasionally misstate figures or "hallucinate" details even when working from real source material — readers should treat this piece as a synthesis aid, verify any figure that matters to a decision against the cited primary source, and focus on the underlying material rather than this summary alone.
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