Chief negotiators from the US and India are scheduled to begin four-day talks here on Monday to finalize details of the interim trade agreement, the framework of which was agreed in February.
The US team will be headed by its chief negotiator, Brendan Lynch. India’s chief negotiator is Darpan Jain, Additional Secretary in the Ministry of Commerce.
The Ministry of Commerce said that the two sides “are proposed to finalize the details of the interim agreement and move forward with negotiations under the broader free trade agreement in multiple areas such as market access, non-tariff and customs procedures, trade facilitation, investment promotion and economic security harmonization.”
On February 7, India and the United States issued a joint statement finalizing the parameters or framework of the first phase of the Bilateral Trade Agreement (BTA) or interim trade agreement. Now the two sides will have to finalize the legal text of this deal.
The framework reaffirmed the commitment of both countries to the broader India-US FTA negotiations.
According to this framework, the United States agreed to reduce tariffs on India to 18 percent from 50 percent. It eliminated the 25 percent customs duty on Indian goods for purchase of Russian oil, and the remaining 25 percent was to be reduced to 18 percent under the agreement.
But on February 20 of this year, the US Supreme Court ruled against President Donald Trump’s sweeping reciprocal tariffs, which he imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977.
After that, the US President announced the imposition of 10 percent customs duties on all countries for a period of 150 days, starting from February 24.
In light of these changes, a meeting between chief negotiators from India and the United States scheduled for February was postponed. The two sides then met in Washington last April, where the Indian team headed by Jain visited America from April 20 to 23, 2026.
In order to continue these discussions, the US team will visit India from June 1 to 4.
As the tariff landscape in the United States changes, both sides may want to reconsider the framework of the agreement.
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, red sorghum for animal feed, tree nuts, fresh and processed fruits, soybean oil, wines and spirits, and additional products.
New Delhi also expressed its intention to purchase US$500 billion worth of US energy products, aircraft and aircraft parts, precious metals, technology products, and coke over the next five years.
This meeting will be important, as India has a comparative advantage over its competing countries. Now, with all US trading partners facing a uniform 10% tariff, the agreement requires recalibration.
Furthermore, in March, the US Trade Representative also launched two unilateral Section 301 investigations against a number of countries, including India, over excess capacity and failure to eliminate forced labor in global supply chains.
India has strongly rejected the allegations made by the USTR in these two investigations and has requested that the investigations be initiated, as the Notice of Initiation fails to provide a convincing rationale to substantiate the allegations.
The US was India’s second largest trading partner in 2025-26. India’s outbound shipments to the US rose marginally by 0.92 per cent to US$87.3 billion during the last fiscal, while imports increased by 15.95 per cent to US$52.9 billion. The trade surplus fell to US$34.4 billion in 2025-26 from US$40.89 billion in 2024-25.
