India-US trade talks in final stretch; more changes on the American end: Jaishankar | Today’s news
New Delhi: India and the US are in the final stretch of finalizing their highly anticipated trade deal, Indian External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said on Saturday.
Speaking at the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit 2026, Jaishankar said there were several unresolved concerns about the end of New Delhi and that most of the recent changes had come from the US side.
“We’ve actually got most of the issues resolved. There’s the final round of issues. And in many cases, those concerns aren’t so much on our end because the changes were on the American side rather than ours. So hopefully we should be able to wrap it up soon.”
He noted that India wants a trade deal that, apart from being mutually beneficial, gives it a comparative advantage over comparable economies.
Pointing out that India lacked a “manufacturing bus” between the 1960s and 1990s, Jaishankar said the production-linked incentive (PLI) programs are aimed at turning the country into a manufacturing hub while building capacity in new-age technologies.
“The PLI schemes are designed to jump-start these different sectors. What we missed, what we have to catch up on now, and that’s why you’re ready to give incentives to industry to respond and set up businesses. So we’re going to have to do orthodox manufacturing. We’ve got to support our SMEs. We’ve got to become economically competitive, which means we have much better infrastructure, which means more of our educational institutions, talent.”
“But we’re also going to have to invest in, say, semiconductors. We’re going to have to invest in modernizing the life sciences. We’re going to have to look at preparing for the era of artificial intelligence. It’s all going to have to be addressed at multiple levels to really navigate these issues,” he added.
He said the vision of ‘Atmanirbhar Bharat’ or the call to ‘Make in India’ or ‘Innovate in India’ are the building blocks of the foreign policy.
A multipolar world order
Talking about the emerging world order, Jaishankar said it will be multipolar – characterized by fiercer competition and greater national assertiveness, which inherently brings more instability. The External Affairs Minister added that India is expected to play a much stronger role and be more influential in this new order.
“The new order will not come out of the blue. It will be an evolution of the current order. And we will have a transition and we are in that transition phase… We hope and reasonably expect that the new order will have, for example, a much stronger role of India or a much stronger influence of India… I think in general the new order will be more multipolar, that there will be many more decision-making centers of the autonomous world.”
