The India-Australia Economic Cooperation and Trade Agreement (ECTA) signed recently is a key step in enhancing bilateral economic ties between the two major Indian Ocean littoral states and reflects the growing strategic alignment between New Delhi and Canberra. While India’s strongest ties with Australia had hitherto largely centred around their common colonial legacy of cricket. This was manifested in the June 2020 virtual summit when Prime Ministers Narendra Modi and Scott Morrison decided to elevate the relationship to the level of a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership. Defence and strategic ties have gained significant traction and the latest ECTA has been hammered out in just six months since negotiations restarted in end-September. Envisaged as an ‘early-harvest’ agreement, the ECTA covers the gamut of economic and commercial relations including trade in goods and services, rules of origin, technical barriers to trade, dispute settlement and customs procedures. Targeting a goal of doubling bilateral trade to about $50 billion in five years, from the $27.5 billion logged in 2021, the partners have set about dismantling or lowering tariff barriers. The agreement aims to support access for a range of Australian and Indian skilled service providers, investors, and business visitors and also, crucially, seeks to address an area linked to another major Australian export — education. Canberra has now agreed, on a reciprocal basis, to ease visa restrictions, enabling students at varied levels of higher education to stay on for periods ranging from 18 months to four years to pursue work opportunities on a temporary basis. With past FTAs having proved less than beneficial to domestic industry, India’s negotiators have set a meaningful precedent in including the feature to periodically reappraise the economic gains from such trade pacts.