Chief Economic Advisor V Anantha Nageswaran on Wednesday said the additional 25% tariffs imposed on India by the United States will be “short-lived” and that there will be certain “recalibrations happening from the other side” on it. Speaking at the Indian Express Adda, Nageswaran said that New Delhi is now getting more mixed signals now from the US instead of “aggressive signals” that were coming in some time ago.
While the CEA said he doesn’t have concrete evidence to prove why US tariffs have not yielded the results that Washington may have expected, Nageswaran cited a statement made by Finland PM Petteri Orpo that US tariffs on India may have been achieving “counter-productive results”.
“I don’t think India needs to do more than what it is already doing. We have increased our purchases of fuel and defence products from the US…Overseas direct investments that the Indian businesses have made in the US over the last 20 years [has also increased],” he said.
What is govt doing to deal with tariff blow?
Nageswaran went on to state that if the government takes into account the amount of data US service companies, like Meta and Google, are collecting from India then the US will be “in massive trade surplus” with the country. “We continue to do what we are doing. I think there will be certain recalibrations made from the other side,” the CEA said.
Targeted intervention programs
While talking about what the government is doing to bring relief to Indian industries and exporters, Nageswaran said that with the advancement of digital public infrastructure in India in the last few years, the Centre can now design intervention programs on an enterprise level. “During COVID, targeted relief programs were executed for businesses. Those will be the approaches we should be taking,” he added.
