Raipur, Jul 29 (PTI) Hidayatullah National Law University (HNLU) here has successfully completed its first TradeLab Project, marking a significant milestone in the university’s growing engagement with international trade policy and digital governance research, officials said on Wednesday.
The project was undertaken in collaboration with the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) and the Centre for Trade and Investment Law (CTIL), New Delhi, a statement issued by the Press Information Bureau (PIB) said.
The project reaffirms HNLU’s commitment to producing globally relevant, policy-oriented legal research, it said.
HNLU Vice-Chancellor Professor Dr V C Vivekanandan said the successful completion of the university’s first TradeLab Project reflected its growing stature as a centre for impactful policy research.
“Digital trade has been rapidly reshaping the global economic landscape, and institutions of higher learning have an important responsibility to contribute rigorous, evidence-based research that informs international policymaking,” he said.
The achievement reflects the dedication of the university’s students and faculty and reinforces HNLU’s vision of nurturing globally engaged legal scholars capable of addressing contemporary challenges in international economic governance, he added.
As part of the project, the HNLU research team contributed to two regional publications — Digital Trade Regulatory Review for South and South-West Asia, 2025 and Regional Digital Trade Integration Index (RDTII) 2.1 Economy Profiles, 2025 — covering Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Turkiye.
The publications are part of the Initiative on Digital Trade Regulatory Integration led by Witada Anukoonwattaka, Economic Affairs Officer, Trade, Investment and Innovation Division, ESCAP, along with her team. The reports were developed in partnership with CTIL through the TradeLab Project hosted at HNLU, the release said.
The initial drafts were prepared by HNLU students Sanjana Ramnath, Dhruvi Agarwal and Garv Arora, with substantive academic contributions from Dr Ankit Awasthi, Head of the Centre for WTO and WIPO Studies at HNLU, and Satwik Shekhar, Tathagata Choudhury and Samarth Nayar of CTIL, it said.
Awasthi said the project exemplified HNLU’s collaborative research model by integrating faculty mentorship with student-led scholarship to address emerging issues in international trade regulation and digital commerce.
He said the successful completion of the project further strengthened HNLU’s international research collaborations and reflected the university’s continued emphasis on interdisciplinary scholarship, capacity building and meaningful contributions to regional and global policy discourse on trade, technology and digital regulation. PTI TKP NP
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