US-India trade deal at ‘very advanced stage’: Indian minister

A much-anticipated trade deal between India and the U.S. is at “a very advanced stage,” India’s Minister of Petroleum and Natural Gas Hardeep Singh Puri told CNBC Tuesday.

“I would try and look at the positive side, I’m not a soothsayer, I don’t know when trade deals will get signed, how long it takes … but I think one [everybody] needs to chill a bit,” he told CNBC’s Amitoj Singh, as India and the EU announced a landmark trade deal.

“I’m told by the people who are in it [the negotiations] that it’s at a very advanced stage, and I’m hoping that, sooner rather than later, it will also see the light of day,” he added of the U.S. deal.

Describing the relationship between the U.S. as “very strong,” Singh Puri said India supported a multilateral trading system and this was evident in the free trade agreement deal with the European Union, announced earlier Tuesday.

That open-to-trade stance would be of benefit to Washington as trade talks continued, he added.

“There’s an economic opportunity here for others who want trade deals. So let’s try and shift it around. I think it’s going to be a mutual benefit, not only for the EU … but the United States and elsewhere also,” he said.

There could be some apprehension in New Delhi on Tuesday as to how U.S. President Donald Trump might react to the country’s new trade deal with the EU, which will see both sides gradually cut tariffs on the majority of each other’s imports.

Despite agreeing a trade deal with the EU, and continuing trade talks to reach an agreement with India, the U.S. has maintained punitive tariffs on imports from both trading partners; while the EU was hit with a 15% duty on its exports ton the States, India was slapped with a much more punitive 50% levy, in part because of its ongoing oil purchases from Russia.

Trump is yet to react publicly to the EU-India deal, which was announced in the early hours of Tuesday morning European time. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has already criticized the EU for forging ahead with a trade agreement with India.

“The U.S. has made much bigger sacrifices than Europeans have. We have put 25% tariffs on India for buying Russian oil. Guess what happened last week? The Europeans signed a trade deal with India,” Bessent told ABC News Sunday.