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.
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.
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.
Multi-year history, not the last six months.
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.