MUMBAI: India is scrambling to defend a new trade deal with the United States that critics have branded as a surrender to Washington, as countries navigate the fallout from President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs.
The deal announced this month has rattled India’s powerful farmers’ unions, who argue that cheap US imports would throttle local producers in a country where agriculture employs more than 700 million people.
Details of the deal remain sparse, limited to a joint statement and a White House factsheet, but New Delhi says an interim pact should be finalized by the end of March.
Analysts warn that other elements of the agreement could also prove volatile.
“In the Trumpian era, there is nothing called certainty,” trade expert Abhijit Das told AFP.
Even if the deal is signed in a few weeks, it would only hold until Trump “decides to impose more tariffs for any perceived inconsistency,” he said.
The most contentious pledge is India’s stated intention to buy $500 billion worth of US goods over five years. India’s annual imports from the US last fiscal year were around $45 billion.
Doubling annual purchases to $100 billion “is unrealistic,” said Ajay Srivastava of the Global Trade Research Initiative, a New Delhi-based think tank.
- Intention not commitment -
Aircraft purchases were a major component of this commitment but even a major expansion of Boeing aircraft orders — decisions made by private airlines — would fall far short, he said.
“Even if India were to add another 200 Boeing aircraft over the next five years, at an estimated cost of $300 million per aircraft, the total value would be about $60 billion.”
Some economists argue the language around purchases is non?binding, hence it protects New Delhi if it fails to meet the goal.
“Framing the target as an intention, rather than a commitment, reduces the risk of the deal later breaking down,” Shivaan Tandon of Capital Economics said in a note on Friday.
Trump’s unpredictability also continues to loom large.
He recently threatened higher tariffs on South Korea over perceived delays by Seoul in implementing a trade agreement announced last July.
Another flashpoint is Washington’s rollback of a 25 percent duty after what it described as India’s “commitment” to stop buying Russian oil.
This promise finds no mention in the joint statement and has neither been confirmed nor denied by the Indian government.
India says its energy policy is driven by national interests and that the country depends on multiple sources for crude oil imports.
- ‘Oil plank’ -
New Delhi’s Russian oil imports have dropped from a mid?2025 peak of more than two million barrels a day to about 1.1 million in January.
Local reports say state-owned refiners have already started purchasing Venezuelan oil for delivery in April.
But it remains unclear if Russian purchases will fall to zero.
The outlook hinges heavily on Mumbai-headquartered Nayara Energy, partly owned by Russia’s Rosneft, which Bloomberg reported plans to keep buying around 400,000 barrels a day.
This will likely remain a bone of contention, given the Trump administration’s stance that it intends to monitor India’s imports.
“New Delhi continues to avoid publicly confirming a full halt and frames energy sourcing as driven by price and availability, which underlines ongoing ambiguity over the oil plank,” Darren Tay of BMI, a unit of Fitch Solutions, told AFP.
“There is tentative evidence that Indian refiners are reducing spot purchases of Russian crude, implying partial adjustment rather than a formal pledge,” Tay said.
The deal remains “too fragile and politically contested” to justify a growth forecast change for India, he added.
India forced to defend US trade deal as doubts mount
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India forced to defend US trade deal as doubts mount
- The deal announced this month has rattled India’s powerful farmers’ unions, who argue that cheap US imports would throttle local producers in a country where agriculture employs more than 700 million
India hosts global leaders, tech moguls at AI Impact Summit
- 20 heads of state scheduled to attend event which runs until Feb. 20
- Summit expected to speed up adoption of AI in India’s governance, expert says
NEW DELHI: A global artificial intelligence summit opened in New Delhi on Monday, with representatives of more than 60 countries scheduled to discuss the use and regulation of AI with the industry’s leaders and investors.
The India AI Impact Summit 2026 is hosted by the Indian government’s IndiaAI Mission — an initiative worth in excess of $1 billion and launched by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology in 2024 to develop the AI ecosystem in the country.
After five days of sessions and an accompanying exhibition of 300 companies at Bharat Mandapam — the venue of the 2023 G20 summit — participating leaders are expected to sign a declaration which, according to the organizer, will outline a “shared road map for global AI governance and collaboration.”
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who will attend the summit on Friday with French President Emmanuel Macron, said on X it was a “matter of great pride for us that people from around the world are coming to India” for the event, which is evidence that the country is “rapidly advancing in the fields of science and technology and is making a significant contribution to global development.”
Among the 20 heads of state that the Indian Ministry of External Affairs has announced as scheduled to attend are Macron, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo, and Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, Abu Dhabi’s crown prince.
Also expected are tech moguls such as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Google’s chief Sundar Pichai.
The summit will give India, the world’s most populous country, a platform to try to steer cooperation and AI regulation between the West and the Global South, and to present to the global audience its own technological development.
“India is leveraging its position as a bridge between emerging and developed economies to bring together not just country leaders and technologists, but also delegates, policy analysts, media, and others … to explore the facets of AI, multilateral collaborations, and the direction that large-scale development of AI should take,” said Anwesha Sen, assistant program manager for technology and policy at Takshashila Institution.
“India is trying to do three things through the AI Impact Summit. One, India is advocating for sovereign AI and the development of inclusive, population-scale solutions. Two, establishing international collaborations that prioritize AI diffusion in sectors like healthcare and agriculture. And three, showcasing how Indian startups and organizations are using frameworks such as that of digital public infrastructure as a model to bridge the two.”
It is the fourth such gathering dedicated to the development of AI. The first one was held in the UK in 2023, a year after the debut of ChatGPT; the 2024 meeting in South Korea; and last year’s event took place in France.
The summit is likely to help the Indian government in speeding up the adoption of AI, according to Nikhil Pahwa, digital rights activist and founder of MediaNama, a mobile and digital news portal, who likened it to the Digital India initiative launched in 2015 to provide digital government services.
“A summit like this, with this much bandwidth allocated to it by the government, even if the agenda is flat, ends up making AI a priority focus for ministries and state governments,” Pahwa told Arab News.
“It encourages diffusion of AI execution-specific thinking and ends up increasing adoption of AI in governance and by both central and state-level ministries. That reduces time for adoption of AI.
“We saw this play out with the government’s Digital India focus: it increased digitization and the adoption of digital technology. The agenda and India’s role in AI globally is less important than speeding up adoption.”
