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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.<\/p>\n
“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.<\/p>\n
“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. <\/p>\n
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<\/a>, announced earlier Tuesday.<\/p>\n That open-to-trade stance would be of benefit to Washington as trade talks continued, he added.<\/p>\n “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.<\/p>\n There could be some apprehension in New Delhi on Tuesday as to how U.S. President Donald Trump might react<\/a> 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. <\/p>\n 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<\/a>, in part because of its ongoing oil purchases from Russia.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n “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.<\/p>\n