Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said on Monday that India-US trade negotiations are continuing but may have hit a plateau and added that the bilateral trade balance currently favours India.
Moreover, the Finance Minister cited the India-European Union trade agreement as an example of India’s approach to negotiating trade pacts. Speaking at the Munich Leaders Meeting 2026 here, Finance Minister Sitharaman said the proposed trade agreement had been hard and very vigorously negotiated. The negotiations are being held under a framework for an interim trade agreement announced in February 2026. She said India had opened up 92.5 per cent of its tariff lines and about 97 per cent of trade value under the agreement, while the EU had opened up about 99 per cent of trade value and around 97 per cent of tariff lines.
“The negotiations are still ongoing although we would like to believe both sides have reached a plateau beyond which giving or taking might be very, very difficult,” she said. The minister said the two countries could still explore whether there was any room for further negotiations. The trade balance currently favoured India and that the United States was seeking to reduce its trade deficit, said Finance Minister Sitharaman. She said the US position reflected concerns over losses it believed had accumulated in its trade relationship with India over the years. India and the US had said they would work towards finalising the interim pact while continuing talks on a broader bilateral trade agreement. She said the EU agreement would cover economies representing about two billion people and around a quarter of global GDP. “The mother of all deals” was an apt description for the agreement, FM Sitharaman said, referring to a phrase used by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. Finance Minister Sitharaman said the selection of market access commitments was based on the complementarity of the two economies and the need to ensure that India’s competitiveness was not adversely affected. (Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
