GTRI warned India about the trade deal and encouraged it to stay away from the Trump administration

India was guided by the economic research group Global Trade Research Initiative (GTRI). GTRI needs to distance itself from any kind of trade talks with America and engage with the Trump government the way Canada and China are. GTRI founder Ajay Srivastava expressed on Saturday that America is putting a lot of pressure on India to sign trade agreements that benefit America more than anything.

Srivastava also mentioned that US President Donald Trump and the US government tend to criticize India with the help of erroneous data. Trump is humiliating India in public, and an unfair trade deal cannot happen in such a case. So, India must walk out of these talks and confront the US trade policies like other big nations. China and Canada have responded with countermeasures to the tariffs that the US has imposed.

Trump claimed on Friday that India has agreed to cut duties on US imports after his government exposed India's unfair trade policies, but Srivastava termed this claim as completely false and called it Trump's attempt to put pressure on India. He said India's silence in this matter is shocking and India should respond to it with facts. The whole world is watching that Trump and his officials are insulting India every day.

US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has said that India should open its agricultural market to American products. He said that when India is negotiating with its largest trading partner America, agriculture cannot be kept out of the talks. He advocated a large-scale trade agreement with India instead of a product-by-product arrangement. At the same time, the GTRI report says that a comprehensive trade agreement with the US could prove dangerous for India. This will not only demand tariff reduction, but may also raise demands for changes in government procurement policy, agricultural subsidies, patent laws and data regulations, which India has been opposing for a long time.

GTRI suggested that India should adopt a zero-for-zero policy. This means that India should remove tariffs only when the US also does so. However, agriculture, passenger cars and other sensitive sectors should be kept out of this agreement. The report warned India that it should avoid repeating the mistake of Australia, as the auto sector contributes one-third to the manufacturing GDP. Citing an example, it said that in the 1980s, Australia reduced import duty on cars from 45 per cent to five per cent, which completely destroyed its domestic car industry.