The Druzhba-Dosti Joint Statement, signed in New Delhi on 11 December 2014 by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Vladimir Putin, set the two countries a hard number: bilateral trade turnover of goods and services of US$30 billion by the year 2025. Read the sentence again. Not goods alone — goods and services, named together, in a document signed by the two leaders. The same statement welcomed a study of trade liberalisation with the Eurasian bloc, but the US$30 billion promise was bilateral, India to Russia, and it had two halves.
The year 2025 has arrived. One half of that sentence has been chased with tankers and rupee-rouble workarounds. The other half was quietly allowed to die. By the time the two leaders met in Moscow in December 2015, the trade agenda had already narrowed in practice to goods — the free-trade study with the Eurasian Economic Union, energy, defence, diamonds. No services framework was proposed. No services feasibility work was published. No bilateral machinery for services cooperation — the working groups, the mutual-recognition talks, the digital-trade dialogues that India has built with a dozen other partners — was ever constructed for Russia. The services half of a leaders-level target simply lapsed, the way things lapse in the permanent government: without a press release, without a minute anyone will now own.
The country that dropped the half
Consider what India was, and is, in the sector its own bureaucracy left off the Russia file. India exported roughly US$387.5 billion in services in FY2024-25 — eighth in the world, about 4.3 per cent of the global market, more than double the level of FY2013-14, the year before Druzhba-Dosti was signed. In digitally delivered services, WTO data for 2023 place India fourth globally, ahead of China. Services are not a line item in India's trade profile. They are the profile.
Now set that against the Russia account. Bilateral trade hit about US$68.7 billion in FY2023-24 — a number officials cite with satisfaction, and one that conceals more than it reveals. India's deficit ran to roughly US$59 billion, driven overwhelmingly by crude. Strip out oil and the relationship shrinks to about US$12 billion. And services? India-Russia services trade stood near US$1 billion in 2021 — a rounding error against India's US$387 billion global services book, and a rounding error against Russia's own services imports, which ran into the tens of billions of dollars a year before the war. The world's eighth-largest services exporter holds roughly one per cent of a market belonging to a country its leaders call a special and privileged strategic partner.
A hard market — which is the point
Let no one pretend Russia is an easy sell. It is a heavily regulated, hard-to-enter services market, with foreign access constrained across sectors from legal services to logistics — and no more open since 2014. The USTR's 2023 report on Russia's WTO record documents data-localisation mandates, forced pre-installation of Russian software, and caps across banking, insurance, telecom and audiovisual media. Russia's WTO services commitments were fixed at its 2012 accession and have not expanded since.
All of which is an argument for structured bilateral engagement, not against it. Markets that closed require negotiation, government-to-government frameworks, and sustained official attention to open — precisely the things Indian services exporters never received on the Russia file. European suppliers historically dominated Russia's services imports; that was the market share available to contest. Indian IT firms facing Moscow's localisation walls and sectoral caps had no bilateral instrument behind them, no services chapter in any negotiating track, no dialogue tasked with their problems. The India-EAEU free-trade study that did proceed is a goods exercise. The bilateral services half of the US$30 billion target — the half that played to India's actual strength — was never given machinery at all.
The case got stronger. The file stayed shut.
Then came 2022, and the argument for the neglected half wrote itself. Western export controls severed Russia from advanced computing, cloud infrastructure and AI. From September 2024, US rules prohibited the supply of IT consultancy, design and cloud-based enterprise software services to persons in Russia, with limited exceptions. ChatGPT is unavailable there. Russia is improvising its own stack — Sberbank launched GigaChat in April 2023; Yandex runs YandexGPT. A services import market worth tens of billions of dollars lost its largest historical suppliers and is scrambling for replacements in exactly the sectors — IT, digital delivery, enterprise services — where India leads the world.
This is the moment a bilateral services framework built between 2015 and 2020 might have paid out. India could have held established channels, recognised credentials and negotiated carve-outs in a market its competitors were forced to vacate. Instead, Indian firms confront Russia's barriers cold, a decade after their own government signed a target that named services and then forgot the word.
Who answers for the file?
Targets are announced by leaders but delivered by officers. Within the Department of Commerce, services trade is a specific brief with specific custodians, and according to officials familiar with the department, Darpan Jain is among the officers who held charge of that portfolio. IndiaWorldEye has sought his comment on the fate of the services half of the 2014 target — what analysis, if any, was conducted on the Russia services opportunity; whether services cooperation was assessed and rejected on merit, deprioritised, or never worked at all; and where in the system the decision to pursue goods alone was taken. No response had arrived by publication; it will be carried in full when it does. To be clear: no document before us shows any named official countermanding a target the Prime Minister signed. Whether the services half died by instruction, by triage, or by the quiet attrition that kills so many files in Udyog Bhawan is precisely the open question this column puts on the record.
The question does not stop at one desk, and this column has not treated it as if it does. Detailed queries have gone to the Commerce Secretary's office, to the Prime Minister's Office, to the Ministry of External Affairs and India's Embassy in Moscow, and to the sectoral ministries whose exporters would have been the beneficiaries — asking, in each case, what progress was made on the US$30 billion goods-and-services target, and why the services component lapsed without explanation. As this column went to press, none had answered the central question. Their responses, when they come, will be published in full.
A target signed by two leaders is not a suggestion. It is an instruction to the machine beneath them. Either the machine decided not to carry half of it out, or it let that half die of neglect. Either way, the public is owed the file noting.
There is a forward path, and it is not complicated. Constitute a bilateral India-Russia services dialogue with a published mandate. Table India's asks — digital delivery, movement of professionals, mutual recognition, payment channels — against Russia's demonstrated hunger for non-Western IT and AI capacity, and negotiate from the strength of a US$387 billion services economy that the 2014 drafters could only have imagined. The half of the promise that vanished between two Decembers can still be honoured. The first step is for someone in the trade bureaucracy to explain, on the record, why it vanished at all. The questions are in. The column will keep asking.
