At the end of September I was back in Berlin for the German Indian Innovation Summit 2026, held on 29 September at the AXICA, a stone’s throw from the Brandenburger Tor. Anyone who has spent time in that part of the city knows the walk. Pariser Platz on one side, the embassies close by, tourists taking the same photograph people have been taking for thirty years. I have done that walk more times than I can count, usually on my way to a meeting where Germany and India agreed, very warmly, that the relationship had enormous potential.
This time the room felt different. I want to try and explain why, and also be honest about what a summit can and cannot do. But first, a word about the man who made it happen.
A friend’s labour
The summit is organised by the German Indian Innovation Corridor, GIIC, a Berlin-registered association that brings together companies, startups, investors, universities and public institutions from both countries. Jan Lachenmayer chairs its executive board. Upen Barve, the Vice-Chair, is a close friend of mine, and I’ll declare that bias up front.
Upen is the dynamic force behind all of this. Anybody who has tried to put three hundred senior people from two very different business cultures into one room, with an agenda that means something, knows how much stubborn effort sits behind a polished stage. Sponsors have to be persuaded, speakers chased, egos managed, and the Germans and the Indians have to be convinced that the other side is actually going to turn up. This was the second edition. The first, in 2025, drew a similar crowd, and a second year is always the harder one, because the novelty has gone and people come only if the first one was worth their time.
On stage, Upen said that trust is the common currency of an innovation corridor. Vertrauen ist die gemeinsame Währung. It’s the kind of line that could easily end up on a banner and mean nothing. Coming from him, I know it’s simply a description of how he works. I wish him every success with what comes next, and I suspect there is a good deal more coming.
What happened in the room
The theme was “AI for Industries”, with tracks on manufacturing, mobility, aerospace and defence, and health, and a speaker list that ran from Harish Salve to Pankaj Vyas of Siemens Technology and Services, Sunil Kakkar of Maruti Suzuki and Norbert Jung of Bosch Connected Industry. Speeches are speeches, though. What interested me more were the things that will still exist when the chairs are stacked away.
The India Desk Germany, run by GIIC with Berlin Partner für Wirtschaft und Technologie and NLND, is meant to give Indian startups and companies a landing point in Berlin and, through it, the wider European market. It’s a modest instrument. It is also exactly what a small Indian firm needs and rarely finds: someone who will tell it which office to go to, which form to fill, and which German partner is serious.
A partnership with NASSCOM aims to connect German companies with India’s Global Capability Centre model, the arrangement under which SAP, Siemens and Bosch already run large IT and R&D operations in India. The big German names worked this out long ago. The interesting question is whether the Mittelstand, with far less appetite for adventure, can be persuaded to follow. If it can, that is where real numbers will come from.
And the BMZ announced a GIZ GIIC Innovation Challenge on public urban mobility in Gurugram, with an emphasis on inclusion and the safety of women in public transport. Anyone who has used public transport in an Indian city after dark will understand why that matters. Funding and details are yet to be announced, so I’ll reserve judgement on scale.
The sceptic’s case, and what it leaves out
I’ll give the sceptic his due first, because he has a point.
For as long as I have been involved with Germany, the economic relationship with India has been described as under-performing. Germany Trade & Invest, working from preliminary Federal Statistical Office figures, puts bilateral trade in 2025 at a record of roughly US$35 billion. But India still ranks only 21st among Germany’s export markets. German investment in India, depending on whose count you trust, sits somewhere between US$15 billion since 2000 and a stock of about €18 billion. For the most populous country in the world and the largest economy in Europe, that is not much. Summits in Berlin have been celebrating potential for twenty years and the potential has stayed largely potential.
All of that is true. What it misses is the direction of travel.
In 2025, German exports to India barely moved, while German imports from India rose by about 12.5 per cent, and imports of Indian machinery by nearly a quarter. India is no longer only a buyer of German machines. It is beginning to sell them back.
The political scaffolding has gone up quickly too. Chancellor Merz made his first visit to India as Chancellor in January, with a delegation of German CEOs. The India-EU free trade agreement was concluded the same month and is reportedly due to be signed on 16 December. Berlin raised its annual cap on skilled-worker visas for Indians from 20,000 to 90,000 in 2024. And according to DAAD figures, there were 69,816 Indian students in Germany in the winter semester of 2025/26, the largest international group in the country. Seventy thousand young Indians learning German engineering and, inevitably, German bureaucracy, is a bigger long-term asset than any single contract. Some will stay. Many will come home and spend the next thirty years as the most natural interlocutors between the two economies.
Fairness cuts both ways
Germany’s old reflexes, restrictive export licensing among them, are clearly loosening. On Project 75(I), the six-submarine programme with TKMS and Mazagon Dock, Ambassador Jasper Wieck said in September that Germany was ready to sign as soon as the Indian side was. That’s quite a statement from a country that, not so long ago, was the one people in Delhi complained about for dragging its feet. If that contract is waiting, it is waiting in Delhi. Indian approvals can be slow, regulation can shift without warning, and German firms are cautious by temperament. They will not be argued out of that caution, only shown, case by case, that the risk is manageable.
The German side has its own homework. Visa appointments, recognition of qualifications, the sheer weight of paperwork in hiring a foreign engineer. A 90,000 visa cap means little if the consulates cannot process applications in reasonable time.
What it portends
Germany needs India more today than it did ten years ago. Its old model, cheap Russian energy, a vast Chinese market, and an American security guarantee taken for granted, has come apart in a remarkably short time. India is not a replacement for any of those things. But it is one of the few large partners on offer that is growing, democratic, and not looking to dominate German industry.
The FTA will help, but trade agreements open doors. They don’t walk anyone through them. That part is done by people: the ones who make the introduction, explain why the Indian partner hasn’t replied for three weeks, or why the German one wants everything in writing. It is unglamorous work, and it is where organisations like GIIC earn their keep.
The test for next year’s summit is a simple one. Not how many people came, but whether some of those who met at the AXICA this year are doing business with each other by the time the next one comes round.
I’d bet on Upen to make sure a few of them are.
This is a shorter version of the piece. The full version is on iyersellmer.com.
Sources: GIIC and its October 2026 press release; Germany Trade & Invest (preliminary Destatis data); reporting on Chancellor Merz’s January 2026 visit; The Hindu on the India-EU FTA; The PIE News citing DAAD India; The Week on Project 75(I).
