- India aims to finalize the US trade deal by March, Commerce Secretary Rajesh Agrawal has said
- Chief Negotiator Darpan Jain will travel to the US next week for legal agreement talks
- No official copy of the trade deal has been made public, only a joint White House statement
The India-US trade deal could be finalised as early as March -- this is what New Delhi is pushing for, Commerce Secretary Rajesh Agrawal has told NDTV. He, however, said it is not a deadline.
"Our effort is to finalize the Trade Agreement (with US) in March... It is an effort but I will not put a deadline to it," he told reporters.
"Chief Negotiator Darpan Jain will travel to the US next week. He will work towards finalising the legal agreement in the US," he added.
The government has not put a date on the agreement, which was announced by US President Donald Trump earlier this month. No copy of the deal is the deal is in the public domain either - an absence that has been pointed out by leaders like Congress's P Chidambaram.
"What has been made available to us is only a joint statement issued by the White House... I can go by only the joint statement. And reading the joint statement, I say it is heavily tilted, tilted in favor of the United States," Chidambaram had told NDTV.
He also said the Section 232 investigation has not been made public either.
"So without these documents and details about the investigation, what do you make out of the joint statement? The only conclusion I can arrive at, it is a framework for an interim agreement, which may lead potentially to a final agreement," he had added.
The opposition criticism has sharpened after India and US joint statement was announced that confirmed that India will eliminate or reduce tariffs on all US industrial goods and a wide range of food and agricultural products. The US will apply a reciprocal tariff rate of 18 per cent on Indian goods.
On February 2, Trump had announced a trade deal with India that slashes US tariffs on Indian goods from 50 per cent to 18 per cent.
Trump announced the deal on social media following a call with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. In his post, he had noted that instead of Russia, India will now buy oil from the US and potentially Venezuela.
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