The final tranche of India-US bilateral trade agreement is ready and legal drafting is currently under process, Union minister for commerce and industry Piyush Goyal said on Thursday. He said the deal will operationalised once a ‘comparable or competitive advantage over our peer countries’ is achieved.
“The US bilateral trade agreement's first tranche has been finalised. It's going through the final contours, the legal drafting, and we hope to be able to finalize that soon and operationalise it once we get a comparable or competitive advantage over our peer countries,” Goyal said.
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The update from Goyal on the trade negotiations came over a week after finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman said the talks on the trade deal have reached a "plateau".
He also said that the free trade agreement between India and the European Union will be inked in December and would come into force from February or March next year.
Later Commerce Secretary Rajesh Agrawal said that the negotiations on the US trade pact are moving in the right direction.
Earlier on Tuesday, external affairs minister S Jaishankar said that India and the US are continuing to engage to iron out differences on the proposed trade deal, and negotiations are heading towards a “landing point”. He noted that the core fundamentals of the bilateral strategic partnership remain unchanged, news agency PTI reported.
"I think we are waiting on a few things. I wouldn't be comfortable spilling the beans in public," he was quoted as saying.
"I think we are waiting on a few things. I wouldn't be comfortable spilling the beans in public," he said at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum on Tuesday evening when asked about the status of the negotiations between the two sides.