Commerce Secretary Rajesh Agrawal on Monday said that most of the contentious or ‘sticky’ issues in the proposed trade deal between India and the United States (US) have been resolved, signalling fast progress towards the first tranche of the agreement.
However, the secretary did not put a timeline on the finalisation of the deal, nor did he put a number on the level of convergence achieved by both sides.
“Most of the sticky issues are more or less resolved. So we are progressing fast. Let’s see what happens,” Agrawal said during a post-Budget interaction with news channel CNBCTV18.
“When it will happen, how fast will it happen? These are the questions I’ll not put a date to, but we are hopeful that we should get it sooner rather than later,” he said.
As far as the proposed agreement is concerned, two frameworks are still in place — an early harvest deal and a larger framework, or Bilateral Trade Agreement (BTA) — which will take time to materialise, because a deep and wider free trade agreement (FTA) takes longer to materialise. The near-term focus is on the early harvest deal, under which the issue of reciprocal tariffs is also taking shape.
“Largely, reciprocal tariffs are in a good space. So one of the key discussions in this is how we are able to align our tariffs on both sides to see that we work towards a more balanced trade between the two nations. So that is going to be the core of whatever we achieve in the first tranche,” he said, adding that the early harvest pact will also look into areas such as non-tariff measures that both sides face.
India–US BTA negotiations were launched in March and have so far included half a dozen rounds of talks. The most recent informal discussions took place in New Delhi during the visit of a trade team headed by the deputy US Trade Representative (USTR) in December. Thereafter, the discussions were paused due to the year-end holiday season, amid the missed ‘fall’ deadline and uncertainty regarding the finalisation of the deal. Both sides are currently engaged virtually. No fresh in-person round of discussions has been planned yet.