India is moving towards joining the EU’s €93.5 billion Horizon Europe research and innovation programme, a leading policy advisor to the government in New Delhi has said, as the two powers step up cooperation on technology.
India was invited to associate to Horizon Europe in 2025, but has yet to formally accept the offer. Now, according to Suman Bery, vice chairperson of Niti Aayog, the Indian government’s in-house policy think tank, joining Horizon Europe is “on the table.”
Speaking on March 18, at an event organised by the French Institute of International Relations in Paris, Bery said joining Horizon Europe was the best practical step to boost science and technology ties between Europe and India.
Indian researchers can already join Horizon Europe projects, but they have to line up their own parallel source of funding, making participation tricky to arrange. If India associated, it would pay into the programme’s budget, allowing Indian researchers to receive money directly from Brussels, smoothing the path to more collaboration.
If India did come on board, it would mark the latest expansion of Horizon Europe across the world. New Zealand, Canada, South Korea and Japan have already associated, although how Brussels reconciles this increasingly global approach with a focus on EU industrial prowess and sensitive dual-use technology remains to be seen.
After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the European Commission made building up relations with India a priority, hoping it could prise the country away from dependence on Russian weapons imports and energy.
The powers set up a Trade and Technology Council, which first met in 2023. The council had its second meeting at a major AI summit held in India in February. The next meeting should take place in the first half of this year.
Credible partnership
This Trade and Technology Council relationship has evolved from “promising but under-committed” to “credible and institutionally anchored,” said Trisha Ray, a research fellow at the Atlantic Council, a US think tank, during the panel discussion.
Gabriele Bertolli, deputy head of unit for international affairs at the Commission’s communications directorate-general, was upbeat about the relationship. It is a “pleasure, for once, to be talking about a partnership that works and works well,” he said.
The EU and India were working together on large language models not primarily based on English, he said. The bloc’s AI Office was also working closely with India’s own AI Safety Institute, he said. Bertolli also wants to see the EU and India share data sets for research.
Digital public infrastructure
India has also built some of the world’s most advanced digital public infrastructures, said Bertolli. These include a digital transactions platform known as the Unified Payments Interface, and a digital ID system called Aadhaar, which recently drew praise from UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
Europe is also working on a digital wallet system. Bertolli said the EU and India want their systems to be “technically interoperable.”
“We want to go towards mutual recognition, for example EU e-signatures, and Indian e-signatures,” he said. The idea was then to jointly offer digital wallet systems to countries in Africa and South Asia, he said.
“We can learn from India,” said Clara Chappaz, ambassador for digital affairs and AI at France’s Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs, during the panel.
“The fact that you can pay [a] street vendor with your phone in India is something I think should make us all reflect on how fast India has been [. . .]and how slow we sometimes are,” she said.
Bery said he had also held meetings with Commission officials to discuss supply chain security.
India-US relationship
However, despite warming links with Europe, India has continued to strike technology deals with the US. Last year, it signed up to a strategic technology initiative, promising to work together on AI, biotechnology, energy and other areas.
Brussels and New Delhi have also diverged over whether to regulate AI. In 2024, the EU passed a sweeping AI Act to regulate the technology, although there’s now pressure from within the bloc to delay its implementation or water it down.
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Until 2024, India was keen on AI regulation, with the government working up legislation modelled on that in the EU, said Ray. But since then, New Delhi has cooled on the idea. “I suspect the US’s about-turn on AI regulation is a part of that,” said Ray, referring to the Donald Trump administration’s opposition to any limits on the technology.
Even so, Brussels and New Delhi do still have mutual interests in governing AI, and protecting artists and the entertainment industry “is a shared interest,” Ray said.
People flows
For all these high-level meetings, councils and government deals, the flow of people between Europe and India was arguably far more important for research and innovation ties, several of the panellists said.
Since the US liberalised immigration rules in 1965, “India and Indian talent, often from our institutes of technology, became absolutely integral to product development and Innovation in areas such as Silicon Valley,” said Bery. Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Google, and Satya Nadella, head of Microsoft, were both born in India.
“We shouldn’t only think about government to government. We should think about people to people,” said Bery.
This year, the EU has established a legal gateway office in India to smooth the visa process for information and communications technology professionals, said Bertolli. As part of a free trade deal agreed in January, the EU promised to streamline visa applications from Indians, although EU governments have the final say on immigration issues.
Ray said a mooted digitalisation of Schengen area visas was long overdue. “Each time I apply for a Schengen visa, I have to submit a stack of documents this thick. It is quite onerous,” she said.
