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India and the US will hold talks in six key areas including infrastructure, services, skill development and standards at the first Indo-US Strategic and Commercial Dialogue in Washington early next week.
The India-US CEO forum, headed by Tata Group’s Cyrus Mistry and Honeywell’s David Cote, will meet a day prior to the commercial dialogue and provide its inputs. The dialogue will be co-chaired by External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and Commerce Minister Nirmala Sitharaman from the Indian side and US Secretary of State John Kerry and US Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker from the other side.
The US-India CEO forum will meet on September 21 while the Indo-US Strategic and Commercial Dialogue is scheduled on September 22.
“A total of six working groups focussing on priority areas of cooperation would meet and identify specific ways to collaborate. All six areas have been selected on the basis of the potential they hold for future growth,” a government official told BusinessLine .
Trade targetThe US is one of the largest trading partners of India and the two countries have set a target of increasing bilateral trade five-fold to $500 billion over the next few years.
While the India and the US already have a forum called the Trade Policy Forum for interaction between policy makers, it focuses mostly on market access issues, while the commercial dialogue has a wider focus of generating more business through policy change, the official explained.
The six working groups cover infrastructure, services, standards, business climate including ease of doing business, innovation, entrepreneurship & skill development and cooperation in technical textiles and guar gum.
“In the area of services, the Minister will, once again, raise the pending issue of a totalisation or social security agreement and press on the need to finalise it soon,” the official said.
Although the US agreed to start talks on a totalisation agreement with India earlier this year, something that it was avoiding for long, not much progress has happened beyond that. A totalisation agreement can help Indian IT companies operating in the US can save up to $4 billion in annual deposits made into the US social security kitty that their Indian workers could neither use nor get refunded.
Infrastructure would be of primary importance as India is trying to woo American investments in the sector. The two countries already have plans of jointly developing smart cities.
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