India and the US have committed to take concrete action in the coming months to address long-standing barriers to bilateral strategic trade, technology, and industrial cooperation, including in the commercial and civil space sector.
At the second meeting of the U.S.-India initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology (iCET) chaired by National Security Advisors (NSAs) of both countries on Monday, it was decided to enhance collaboration across governments, industry and academia in emerging technologies across manufacturing, space, defence, artificial intelligence and telecommunications.
Discussions also focussed India’s planned acquisition of the MQ-9B platforms, the possible co-production of land warfare systems, and progress on other co-production initiatives outlined in the U.S.-India Roadmap for Defense Industrial Cooperation, a joint fact sheet on the meeting said
MQ-9B platform is Reaper drone whose sale to India has been approved by President Joe Biden. Ajit Doval and Jack Sullivan also took stock of the progress in negotiations between GE Aerospace and Hindustan Aeronautics Limited for the co-production of GE F414-INS6 engines to power India’s future fighter fleet.
In telecom the factsheet talked about building partnerships to deploy high-quality, cost-effective Open RAN technology at scale, including through a $5 million USAID Edge Fund grant to Qualcomm and Mavenir to test its ORAN stack in India in partnership with Bharti Airtel, with Qualcomm contributing an additional $9.4 million to the project.
Forging public-private cooperation between vendors and operators of the two countries led by India’s Bharat 6G Alliance and the U.S. Next G Alliance for Open RAN field trials and roll-outs in both the countries, with U.S. funding support was another idea discussed.
Launching a new strategic semiconductor partnership between General Atomics and 3rdiTech to co-develop semiconductor design and manufacturing for precision-guided ammunition and other national security-focused electronics platforms was also on the table.
The discussions also dealt with combining capabilities in biotechnology and biomanufacturing, partnership in clean energy and critical minerals, and quantum and high-performance computing.