Union Textiles Minister Giriraj Singh on Thursday, 4 June 2026 flagged the India-Oman Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA) as a breakthrough for Indian textile and apparel exporters, saying the pact will deliver duty-free market access for the labour-intensive sector. In a post shared from New Delhi via the NaMo App, the minister highlighted fresh opportunities for MSMEs under the bilateral deal with the Gulf nation.

Writing in Hindi, Singh declared: 'Bharat-Oman CEPA: Textile aur Apparel Export ko milega duty-free access' ('India-Oman CEPA: Textile and apparel exports will get duty-free access'). The message was accompanied by an image and a link to a report on the pact's implications for textiles, apparel and small enterprises.

Context

The India-Oman CEPA is a bilateral trade agreement negotiated to deepen commercial ties between New Delhi and Muscat, two longstanding partners in the western Indian Ocean. Oman, a member of the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), has historically been a steady buyer of Indian goods ranging from rice and pharmaceuticals to engineering products and apparel.

Singh's intervention positions textiles as a marquee gain from the agreement. By eliminating customs duties on Indian textile and apparel shipments to Oman, the pact is intended to make Indian mills, weavers and garment units price-competitive against suppliers from China, Bangladesh, Vietnam and Turkey in the Omani market.

Policy backdrop

The Oman deal sits within a broader push by the Centre to lock in preferential access across the Gulf. The India-UAE CEPA, signed in February 2022, granted duty-free access on roughly 90 percent of Indian textile tariff lines and has served as a template for subsequent agreements in the region.

Textiles and apparel routinely feature at the centre of these pacts because of the sector's outsized contribution to employment and its existing export capacity. The Centre has paired such trade deals with domestic interventions such as the PLI scheme for textiles and the PM MITRA mega parks programme, both of which fall under Singh's ministry.

The Oman agreement extends the same tariff-liberalisation logic to a smaller but strategically located market that doubles as a re-export hub for parts of East Africa and the wider Gulf.

Stakeholders and impact

The most direct beneficiaries are textile and apparel exporters, particularly MSMEs in clusters such as Tiruppur, Surat, Ludhiana, Panipat and Noida. Duty-free entry typically translates into a tariff advantage of several percentage points, which can be decisive in thin-margin categories like cotton knitwear, home textiles and ready-made garments.

For Oman, the agreement offers Indian investment into its manufacturing, logistics and downstream apparel retail. Indian diaspora-run firms already operate across Muscat, Sohar and Salalah, and the pact is expected to ease their sourcing arrangements with units back home.

Workers in labour-intensive garment factories stand to benefit if order books expand, though the scale of the gain will depend on the final tariff schedule and rules-of-origin requirements, which determine how much value addition must occur in India for goods to qualify for concessional treatment.

What's next

Industry bodies will be watching for the publication of the full tariff schedule and the rules-of-origin text, which together will define how widely the duty-free benefit can be claimed. Quarterly textile export data to Oman will offer the first hard read on whether the agreement is translating into shipments on the ground.

Any required parliamentary notification and the operational rollout through customs authorities will also be closely tracked. For Singh's ministry, the Oman pact is one more building block in an emerging Gulf-wide preferential trade architecture that the Centre is betting on to lift India's share of global textile and apparel trade.