The pact could also be a turning point for British alcohol and spirits companies.

Reducing customs duty on Scotch whiskey from 150% to 75% immediately and then gradually to 40% over 10 years is “a real change, not a small change”, says Avneet Singh of Modern Drinks Pvt Ltd, an importing company based in the capital Delhi.

How much this will boost imports will become clearer in the coming months, Singh says, although he believes the boost will increase before the new terms of trade come into effect.

“The focus has been on preparing the operational side. That means working closely with UK suppliers to ensure certificates of origin and other trade documentation are in place, reviewing customs and compliance requirements, and coordinating with logistics and customs clearance partners so that shipments can benefit from the revised tariff structure from day one,” Singh said.

So far it has been a period of “careful preparation rather than rapid expansion,” he says. Bigger changes will come once companies see the real savings on imported goods.

Beyond these few industry sectors, however, the overall impact of the deal could be “incremental rather than transformative,” according to trade experts.

Data from the Delhi-based Global Trade Research Initiative (GTRI) think tank shows that India exported goods worth $13.4 billion to the UK in the 2025-2026 financial year, but more than half of these exports entered the country duty-free under its most favored nation regime.

As for imports, India imported $11.7 billion from the United Kingdom, and more than 45% consisted of silver, which remains on India’s exclusion list and is outside the deal.

“The real test is whether products that previously faced tariffs of 4% to 16% in the UK – such as textiles, clothing, footwear, carpets, cars, seafood, grapes and mangoes – get higher export orders, higher export volumes and better profit margins. Those indicators will provide the clearest evidence of the deal’s success. The impact of the FTA should become visible in the next one to three years,” GTRI’s Ajay Srivastava told the BBC.

But several unresolved challenges, such as the UK’s maintenance of tariffs on steel imports above a specific quota to protect domestic producers, could prove impediments to using the full scope of the deal, according to Srivastava.

The UK’s proposed carbon tax (called CBAM, external) could also reduce some of the gains from the FTA, he adds, because even if tariffs “fall to zero under the FTA, carbon-related border charges could increase the effective cost of Indian exports in sectors covered by the CBAM, creating new trade frictions.”