India has concluded a large number of Strategic Partnerships (SPs) as a flexible instrument of foreign policy. This paper examines the economic dimension of these partnerships, focusing on trade, investment, resources, technology, and skills and mobility. Drawing on merchandise trade data (2011–2025), FDI and ODI stocks, and institutional mapping of nine long-standing partners—South Africa, France, Germany, Japan, Brazil, Malaysia, the UAE, Australia and the United States—it finds that the relationship between SPs and bilateral trade performance is tenuous.

When COVID-19 struck, nations that built sovereign public-health capability - domestic vaccines, digital delivery platforms, distributed testing - survived with economies and societies intact. India, against every expectation, became the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer and administered 2.2 billion doses on a platform it built itself1. Artificial intelligence is the next pandemic. The playbook exists. India wrote much of it.

On 23 June 2016, the ‘United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’ chose via a referendum to leave the European Union. Reciting the full name of the UK is not a mere formality here – it serves to illustrate how one nation can affect the future of three others as well. By most measures, the UK has been poorly served by ‘Brexit’, and responsibility for this substantially (though not exclusively) lies with the English nation, more than the Scots, Irish or Welsh.

The “AGI for Bharath” Conference was conceived as a first-of-its-kind strategic dialogue bringing together India’s defence leadership, technology community, intelligence establishment, policy architects, and academic institutions to address the single most consequential strategic challenge of the twenty-first century: India’s position in the global race toward Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). The Conference, which was held at Bharath Mandapam in New Delhi on 17 February 2026 during the India AI Impact Summit, structured around five thematic pillars: