Dhaka Sends a Trade Team to Delhi, Testing Whether Commerce Can Thaw a Cold Political Winter
The 16th Joint Working Group meeting in New Delhi will address trade barriers, the bilateral trade imbalance and restrictions affecting land-based commerce.
A ten-member Bangladeshi delegation left for New Delhi on Wednesday for the first meeting in three years of the Bangladesh–India Joint Working Group on Trade, a technical forum that used to sit once a year and then went quiet after the political rupture of 2024.
The 16th session is set for 8 and 9 October. Additional Secretary Aysha Akter of the commerce ministry's free-trade wing is leading the team, which is due back in Dhaka on 10 October. The order covers officials from commerce, foreign affairs and railways, plus the National Board of Revenue, the Land Port Authority, the Trade and Tariff Commission and the standards body. The mix signals that the agenda is not only tariffs: land ports, rail freight and product standards are expected to sit on the table with the trade gap.
The working group last met in Dhaka on 26–27 September 2023. Before that, it sat in New Delhi in March 2022. The annual rhythm broke after the Awami League government fell in the August 2024 uprising and bilateral ties cooled. Since then, both sides have tightened the land border as a trade tool. In April 2025 Bangladesh barred Indian yarn through Benapole, Bhomra, Sonamasjid, Banglabandha and Burimari, while leaving the sea route open. India later limited Bangladeshi garments, processed food, plastics and PVC goods on land routes, and in June added restrictions on jute and some textiles.
Dhaka's priorities, according to officials quoted by The Business Standard and Daily Sun, are to cut that imbalance, clear tariff and non-tariff barriers, restore normal land-port movement, and seek a review of India's anti-dumping duties on Bangladeshi jute. Indian duties on jute and Bangladesh's yarn curbs are both expected to come up. Export Promotion Bureau figures cited in local reporting put Bangladesh's imports from India at about $10.96 billion in fiscal 2025–26, up from $9.62 billion the year before — a gap Dhaka has long called unsustainable.
Older sessions also covered border haats, 24-hour opening of the Petrapole–Benapole checkpoint, and groundwork for a Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement. Some of that unfinished business is likely to return. In August, Commerce Minister Khandakar Abdul Muktadir raised suspended haats, full use of land ports and the yarn curbs with Indian High Commissioner Dinesh Trivedi in Dhaka.
The meeting is political as well as commercial. It comes while dates for a visit by Prime Minister Tarique Rahman to New Delhi remain unsettled, and while Dhaka is still pressing India over Sheikh Hasina's extradition. Hindustan Times has reported that both capitals want to restart institutional talks — trade in Delhi, consular issues later in Dhaka — even if a leaders' visit stays uncertain. Dhaka has wanted a commerce-secretaries meeting to follow this working group; India has indicated that forums on transit and border trade should come first.
No one in either capital is describing two days of officials as a reset. What the session can do is show whether the two bureaucracies can still bargain over yarn, jute and land ports while the larger political file stays open.