India's Approach To Bilateral Investment Treaties: A Shift From Investor Protection To State Sovereignty
- IJLLR Journal
- Apr 11, 2025
- 1 min read
Aparna Goswami & Soumyadeep Maity, Amity Law School, Kolkata
ABSTRACT
India's redesign of its Bilateral Investment Treaty (BIT) template is a doctrinally seismic development in international investment law—one that questions the dominant orthodoxy of investor-focused treaty design. This paper questions the legal trajectory of India's BIT regime, from the embrace of liberal investment standards, such as Fair and Equitable Treatment (FET), Most-Favoured Nation (MFN) clauses, and liberal Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) clauses, to the publication of the 2016 Model BIT, reaffirming the primacy of state sovereignty and regulatory freedom. On the basis of doctrinal legal argument and jurisprudential critique, this study investigates how negative arbitral awards, most notably White Industries v. India motivated India's abandonment of liberal investment standards and prompted a more conservative, sovereignty-aware approach. This paper then places India's BIT approach in the wider currents of global treaty reform, providing a comparative examination identifying convergence and divergence with international practice. In so doing, it weighs the legal and policy importance of India's approach and advocates a re-imagined BIT— one that reconcile the imperatives of foreign investment protection with the legitimate public policy concerns of the host state.
