There’s a lot on the line this week if you’re a Scottish whisky company. India is the world’s largest whisky market and the second-largest Scotch export market by volume.

The Scotch Whisky industry takes the view that the current 150 per cent tariff on imported liquor in India with its 1.4bn people – is substantially holding back the growth potential of their product.

The reduction of this tariff is now a top UK demand in bilateral trade talks ahead of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s visit to India this week.

Indeed, levies on whisky makers has become something of a problem in recent UK-India trade relations and emerged as a core issue in trade talks that began earlier this year.

Johnson is travelling to India this week to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi hoping to advance trade negotiations and broaden security cooperation in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Jean-Etienne Gourgues, chair of Chivas Brothers, part of France’s Pernod Ricard group, told the Financial Times that “the odds have never been so high” that a trade deal would be reached. Scotch “is a very small portion of all the whiskies which are being enjoyed [in India]”, he said. “The midterm target would be to at least double the size of the market. And with the size of the population of the middle class, I’ve seen the appetite is extremely high. It should become one of the top markets.”

Trade has stagnated between the UK and India over the last ten years, which was worth £18.5bn in 2020. To put this into perspective trade between the UK and Belgium (population 12mn) in the same year was £38bn. India only accounts for 1.2 per cent of British exports overall and languishes as the UK’s 21st-biggest export market.