India sealed a civil aviation deal with the European Union on Sunday, September 28, 2008, effectively legalizing 26 individual deals India holds with individual states of EU. The deal was signed a day before the yearly EU Summit on Monday. India's ambassador to the EU and officials from the French government and the EU's bureaucracy inked the civil aviation deal just ahead of a meeting between Indian PM Dr Manmohan Singh and French President Nicolas Sarkozy at Marseille. The rotating presidency of EU is being held by France presently.  

The signing of the civil aviation deal between the European Union and India happened a day after European Commission declared it was giving India 470 million euros as aid money to cut poverty over the ensuing five years. This EU-India civil aviation deal terminates the legal insecurity that cropped up in 2002. This happened after European Court said bilateral deals on civil aviation services between EU member states and third countries discriminated against airlines from other EU states.