India to drop tariffs to ‘nothing’, says Trump

Washington: US President Donald Trump on Tuesday said India has dropped — or it will — its tariffs on imports from the US to “nothing”. He shared no details on goods and sectors affected.

The US and India have been negotiating a trade deal that Trump administration officials have said could be one of the first to be announced, among the slew of deals under discussion between the US and its other trade partners.

Speaking of the key US demands in these negotiations – drop tariffs or grant market access, President Trump said, “India, as an example, has one of the highest tariffs in the world. We’re not going to put up with that. And they’ve agreed already to drop it.”

“They’ll drop it to nothing,” President Trump said in a White House media interaction alongside Canada’s Mark Carney. “They’ve already agreed.”

No details are available on the India-US trade talks. But President Trump has been open about his demands going back to his first term, when the two sides had come very close to signing a trade deal, which was to be announced during his visit to India in February 2019. Talks fell through, and they were not pursued by either country during President Joe Biden’s tenure.

Talks got underway in the run-up to, and after, President Trump’s Liberation Day announcement of sweeping tariffs on nearly all of the US’s trading partners. Imports from India were tariffed at 26 per cent, which is currently down to 10 per cent, a flat rate the American president announced for all countries in a 90-day pause, with the exception of China, whose goods coming into the US are under a 145 per cent levy.

Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, said at a congressional hearing Tuesday, the US is currently in talks with 17 of its 18 major trading partners – China is the 18th – and that he expects to see deals being announced soon.

He has said in the past that he expected the deal with India to be among the first to be announced.

IANS