India Looks Toward Latin America and Does Not Only See Markets
- Carolina Gaviria Salazarjournalist and communication strategist
For a long time, talking about relations between India and Latin America could lead us almost automatically to a conversation about trade: what India buys, what the region sells, where investment opportunities are, and how far we can take exchanges between two markets that, although geographically distant, have increasingly more interests in common.
But a recent cooperation agenda between India and Nicaragua suggests that the relationship is beginning to speak another language.
In July of this year, Nadeska Imara Cuthbert Carlson presented her Letters of Credence as Nicaragua’s ambassador to the president of India, Droupadi Murmu. From that meeting, both countries set out an agenda that includes eight areas: digital and technological innovation, technical training and academic exchange, climate resilience and renewable energy, health, culture, tourism, agriculture, and trade.
The list might seem merely diplomatic. But if looked at closely, it tells something more interesting: India is not looking at Nicaragua only as a market; it is also looking at its development needs and the capacities it can help build.
And there one can move from talking about a commercial relationship between two countries to a bond for sharing capacities, since India and Nicaragua already have a history of cooperation in areas that are now reappearing on the agenda. India supported the creation of an information technology training center in Managua, handed over to the Nicaraguan government in 2011, and it has also offered training through the ITEC program, in addition to cooperation linked to solar energy.
That is, the conversation did not begin yesterday. What seems to be changing is its breadth: technology, education, health, agriculture, energy, and trade are not isolated sectors. Together they form an idea of cooperation that goes beyond the exchange of goods: sharing knowledge, training talent, transferring capacities, and working on problems that no country can completely solve on its own.
The Indian researcher Sachin Chaturvedi, one of the leading scholars of South-South cooperation, has used the concept of development compact to explain a characteristic of the Indian model: cooperation based on mutual benefits, capacity building, and relations among countries of the South, in contrast to more vertical traditional models of North-South assistance.
It does not mean that economic interests disappear. It would be naive to think so. International cooperation always also has a strategic dimension. But that is precisely where the interesting part lies: trade and cooperation no longer have to be separate conversations.
Nicaragua Is the Example, but the Story Is Regional
What is happening between India and Nicaragua should not be analyzed as an isolated episode either. For in June 2025, India and the Central American Integration System (SICA) held a dialogue on cooperation in which they identified areas such as food and nutritional security, health, connectivity, agriculture, digital transformation, energy, trade, and investment. India also highlighted its experience in digital transformation, medicines and affordable healthcare, disaster resilience, and renewable energy.
Latin America needs to diversify its international relations at a time when supply chains, geopolitical tensions, the energy transition, and technological transformation are changing the rules of the global economy.
India, for its part, needs partners, markets, resources, and new routes of cooperation. There are different interests that can meet at the same table.
The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) stated it explicitly at a seminar on India-Latin America and the Caribbean relations held in December 2025: the region is interested in strengthening and expanding its economic and cooperation relations with India to drive growth, development, and productive transformation.
José Manuel Salazar-Xirinachs, executive secretary of ECLAC, then raised an especially relevant idea: “Latin America must intelligently manage its integration with the world and use it as a tool to drive growth, productive transformation, and mutually beneficial relations with a growing number of partners.”
Then, what can Latin America find in India? What can we learn from it?
India has developed particular capacities in sectors that coincide with some of our region’s most urgent challenges: digital technology, pharmaceuticals, renewable energy, agriculture, technical training, and low-cost solutions. India’s own Ministry of Commerce and Industry notes that trade with Latin America and the Caribbean reached US$39.190 billion in 2024-25, with exchanges that combine Latin American natural resources and agricultural products with Indian strengths in engineering goods, pharmaceuticals, information technologies, and other industries.
But reducing that relationship to a trade balance would mean losing an important part of the story. In a speech on the future of India-Latin America relations, an Indian government official identified four major pillars for deepening the bond: diversification of supply chains, alliances around strategic resources, expansion of products and services, and development cooperation.
He also highlighted Indian projects in infrastructure, renewable energy, agriculture, and other areas in various Latin American countries, as well as lines of credit for countries in the region, including Nicaragua.
It is a relationship that is beginning to be built in several layers. Markets, yes. But also technology. Resources, yes. But also knowledge. Trade, yes. But also training.
Chaturvedi has studied this transformation for years and argues that Indian cooperation is part of a broader effort to build a development discourse from the Global South itself, based on the exchange of knowledge and capacities.
This does not mean building a closed alliance against the Global North. India, in fact, maintains deep relations with the United States, Europe, and other powers. What it is doing is more pragmatic: expanding its options. And Latin America should think in the same way. It is not about replacing one partner with another. It is about preventing our international relations from depending on very few actors.
And Colombia?
This is where this story stops being only about Nicaragua. Because many of the areas that India and Nicaragua are putting on the table are also part of the conversations Colombia needs to have: digital transformation, technical education, energy transition, agriculture, health, climate resilience, and innovation.
It should not be only how much we trade with India. It should be what place we want to occupy in a relationship that is growing.
While Nicaragua builds an agenda that connects technology, training, energy, health, agriculture, and trade, and while ECLAC calls on Latin America to strategically diversify its ties with India, Colombia has an opportunity that goes beyond increasing exports. It can look at India as a market, as an investor, and as a trade partner.
But it can also look at it as a knowledge partner. Because perhaps that is the most interesting transformation of this relationship.
Sources:
● Presidency of India: Letters of Credence of Nicaragua’s ambassador, July 6, 2026. https://presidentofindia.nic.in/press_releases/envoys-six-nations-present-credentials president-india-3
● Government of Nicaragua: details of the eight areas of the bilateral agenda. https://www.el19digital.com/articulos/ver/179124-presentamos-cartas-credenciales-a nte-hermana-republica-de-india
● Ministry of External Affairs of India: background on India-Nicaragua cooperation, IT Centre, ITEC, and solar energy. https://www.mea.gov.in/Portal/ForeignRelation/Website_Nicaragua_Oct2023.pdf
● Ministry of External Affairs of India: India-SICA dialogue and South-South cooperation areas. https://www.mea.gov.in/press-releases?dtl%2F39701%2FVirtual_Dialogue_on_coop
● ECLAC: India–Latin America and the Caribbean: Emerging Partners in a Shifting Global Economy. https://www.cepal.org/en/pressreleases/it-latin-america-and-caribbeans-best-interest strengthen-economic-and-cooperative https://www.cepal.org/en/events/international-seminar-india-latin-america-and-caribb ean-emerging-partners-shifting-global
● Ministry of Commerce and Industry of India: India-Latin America and the Caribbean trade 2024-25. https://www.commerce.gov.in/ministryofcommerce/node/3392
● Sachin Chaturvedi: The Logic of Sharing: Indian Approach to South-South Cooperation and works on the Development Compact. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0020881717705927
● SRC LinkedIn profile. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/socialresearchcenter_src-research-internationalnews activity-7504177308484882432-uTFN?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_d esktop&rcm=ACoAAC0dV_0BfY01i3n7XoL8Ho0sTX1PuL4M2n4
But a recent cooperation agenda between India and Nicaragua suggests that the relationship is beginning to speak another language.
In July of this year, Nadeska Imara Cuthbert Carlson presented her Letters of Credence as Nicaragua’s ambassador to the president of India, Droupadi Murmu. From that meeting, both countries set out an agenda that includes eight areas: digital and technological innovation, technical training and academic exchange, climate resilience and renewable energy, health, culture, tourism, agriculture, and trade.
The list might seem merely diplomatic. But if looked at closely, it tells something more interesting: India is not looking at Nicaragua only as a market; it is also looking at its development needs and the capacities it can help build.
And there one can move from talking about a commercial relationship between two countries to a bond for sharing capacities, since India and Nicaragua already have a history of cooperation in areas that are now reappearing on the agenda. India supported the creation of an information technology training center in Managua, handed over to the Nicaraguan government in 2011, and it has also offered training through the ITEC program, in addition to cooperation linked to solar energy.
That is, the conversation did not begin yesterday. What seems to be changing is its breadth: technology, education, health, agriculture, energy, and trade are not isolated sectors. Together they form an idea of cooperation that goes beyond the exchange of goods: sharing knowledge, training talent, transferring capacities, and working on problems that no country can completely solve on its own.
The Indian researcher Sachin Chaturvedi, one of the leading scholars of South-South cooperation, has used the concept of development compact to explain a characteristic of the Indian model: cooperation based on mutual benefits, capacity building, and relations among countries of the South, in contrast to more vertical traditional models of North-South assistance.
It does not mean that economic interests disappear. It would be naive to think so. International cooperation always also has a strategic dimension. But that is precisely where the interesting part lies: trade and cooperation no longer have to be separate conversations.
Nicaragua Is the Example, but the Story Is Regional
What is happening between India and Nicaragua should not be analyzed as an isolated episode either. For in June 2025, India and the Central American Integration System (SICA) held a dialogue on cooperation in which they identified areas such as food and nutritional security, health, connectivity, agriculture, digital transformation, energy, trade, and investment. India also highlighted its experience in digital transformation, medicines and affordable healthcare, disaster resilience, and renewable energy.
Latin America needs to diversify its international relations at a time when supply chains, geopolitical tensions, the energy transition, and technological transformation are changing the rules of the global economy.
India, for its part, needs partners, markets, resources, and new routes of cooperation. There are different interests that can meet at the same table.
The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) stated it explicitly at a seminar on India-Latin America and the Caribbean relations held in December 2025: the region is interested in strengthening and expanding its economic and cooperation relations with India to drive growth, development, and productive transformation.
José Manuel Salazar-Xirinachs, executive secretary of ECLAC, then raised an especially relevant idea: “Latin America must intelligently manage its integration with the world and use it as a tool to drive growth, productive transformation, and mutually beneficial relations with a growing number of partners.”
Then, what can Latin America find in India? What can we learn from it?
India has developed particular capacities in sectors that coincide with some of our region’s most urgent challenges: digital technology, pharmaceuticals, renewable energy, agriculture, technical training, and low-cost solutions. India’s own Ministry of Commerce and Industry notes that trade with Latin America and the Caribbean reached US$39.190 billion in 2024-25, with exchanges that combine Latin American natural resources and agricultural products with Indian strengths in engineering goods, pharmaceuticals, information technologies, and other industries.
But reducing that relationship to a trade balance would mean losing an important part of the story. In a speech on the future of India-Latin America relations, an Indian government official identified four major pillars for deepening the bond: diversification of supply chains, alliances around strategic resources, expansion of products and services, and development cooperation.
He also highlighted Indian projects in infrastructure, renewable energy, agriculture, and other areas in various Latin American countries, as well as lines of credit for countries in the region, including Nicaragua.
It is a relationship that is beginning to be built in several layers. Markets, yes. But also technology. Resources, yes. But also knowledge. Trade, yes. But also training.
Chaturvedi has studied this transformation for years and argues that Indian cooperation is part of a broader effort to build a development discourse from the Global South itself, based on the exchange of knowledge and capacities.
This does not mean building a closed alliance against the Global North. India, in fact, maintains deep relations with the United States, Europe, and other powers. What it is doing is more pragmatic: expanding its options. And Latin America should think in the same way. It is not about replacing one partner with another. It is about preventing our international relations from depending on very few actors.
And Colombia?
This is where this story stops being only about Nicaragua. Because many of the areas that India and Nicaragua are putting on the table are also part of the conversations Colombia needs to have: digital transformation, technical education, energy transition, agriculture, health, climate resilience, and innovation.
It should not be only how much we trade with India. It should be what place we want to occupy in a relationship that is growing.
While Nicaragua builds an agenda that connects technology, training, energy, health, agriculture, and trade, and while ECLAC calls on Latin America to strategically diversify its ties with India, Colombia has an opportunity that goes beyond increasing exports. It can look at India as a market, as an investor, and as a trade partner.
But it can also look at it as a knowledge partner. Because perhaps that is the most interesting transformation of this relationship.
Sources:
● Presidency of India: Letters of Credence of Nicaragua’s ambassador, July 6, 2026. https://presidentofindia.nic.in/press_releases/envoys-six-nations-present-credentials president-india-3
● Government of Nicaragua: details of the eight areas of the bilateral agenda. https://www.el19digital.com/articulos/ver/179124-presentamos-cartas-credenciales-a nte-hermana-republica-de-india
● Ministry of External Affairs of India: background on India-Nicaragua cooperation, IT Centre, ITEC, and solar energy. https://www.mea.gov.in/Portal/ForeignRelation/Website_Nicaragua_Oct2023.pdf
● Ministry of External Affairs of India: India-SICA dialogue and South-South cooperation areas. https://www.mea.gov.in/press-releases?dtl%2F39701%2FVirtual_Dialogue_on_coop
● ECLAC: India–Latin America and the Caribbean: Emerging Partners in a Shifting Global Economy. https://www.cepal.org/en/pressreleases/it-latin-america-and-caribbeans-best-interest strengthen-economic-and-cooperative https://www.cepal.org/en/events/international-seminar-india-latin-america-and-caribb ean-emerging-partners-shifting-global
● Ministry of Commerce and Industry of India: India-Latin America and the Caribbean trade 2024-25. https://www.commerce.gov.in/ministryofcommerce/node/3392
● Sachin Chaturvedi: The Logic of Sharing: Indian Approach to South-South Cooperation and works on the Development Compact. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0020881717705927
● SRC LinkedIn profile. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/socialresearchcenter_src-research-internationalnews activity-7504177308484882432-uTFN?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_d esktop&rcm=ACoAAC0dV_0BfY01i3n7XoL8Ho0sTX1PuL4M2n4
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