US-India four-day trade talks begin today

The chief negotiators of the US and India will begin four-day talks in New Delhi on Monday on finalising the details of the interim trade pact, whose framework was agreed upon in February. The US team will be led by its chief negotiator, Brendan Lynch. India’s chief negotiator is Darpan Jain, who is an Additional Secretary in the Department of Commerce.

The two sides are “proposed to finalise the details of the interim agreement and take forward the negotiations under the broader BTA on multiple areas such as market access, non-tariff measures, customs and trade facilitation, investment promotion, and economic security alignment,” the Commerce Ministry has said.

On February 7, India and the US issued a joint statement finalising the contours or framework of the first phase of the bilateral trade agreement (BTA) or an interim trade agreement. Now, both sides will have to finalise the legal text for that deal.

The framework reaffirmed the countries’ commitment to the broader India-US BTA negotiations.

According to that framework, the US had agreed to reduce tariffs on India to 18 per cent from 50 per cent. It had removed the 25 per cent tariffs on Indian goods for buying Russian oil and was to cut the remaining 25 per cent to 18 per cent under the pact.

But, on February 20 this year, the US Supreme Court ruled against President Donald Trump’s sweeping reciprocal tariffs, which were imposed under the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). After that, the US President announced the imposition of 10 per cent tariffs on all countries for 150 days, starting February 24.

In light of these changes, a meeting between the chief negotiators of India and the US scheduled for February was postponed. The two sides then met in Washington in April, when the Indian team, headed by Jain, visited America from April 20-23, 2026.

To carry forward those discussions, the US team is visiting India from 1-4th June. As the tariff landscape has changed in the US, both sides may wish to revisit the agreement’s framework.

Under the agreed framework, India proposed to eliminate or reduce tariffs on all US industrial goods and a wide range of US food and agricultural products, including dried distillers’ grains (DDGs), red sorghum for animal feed, tree nuts, fresh and processed fruit, soybean oil, wine and spirits, and additional products.

New Delhi has also expressed its intentions to purchase USD 500 billion of US energy products, aircraft and aircraft parts, precious metals, technology products, and coking coal over the next five years.

This meeting will be important, as India enjoys a comparative advantage over its competitor countries. Now, with all US trading partners facing a uniform 10 per cent tariff, the pact requires recalibration. Further, in March, the US Trade Representative (USTR) also launched two unilateral Section 301 investigations against a number of countries, including India, over excess capacity and failures to eradicate forced labour in global supply chains.

India has strongly rejected allegations made by the US Trade Representative in those two investigations and has requested that the probes be initiated, as the initiation notice has failed to provide a cogent rationale to substantiate the claims.

The US was the second-largest trading partner of India in 2025-26. India’s outbound shipments to the US grew marginally 0.92 per cent to USD 87.3 billion during the last fiscal year, while imports increased 15.95 per cent to USD 52.9 billion. The trade surplus declined to USD 34.4 billion in 2025-26 from USD 40.89 billion in 2024-25.