New Delhi promised to buy more U.S. oil, gas and military equipment and fight illegal immigration, Reuters reported.
The series of agreements emerged after talks between U.S. President Donald Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the White House, just hours after Trump railed against the climate for U.S. businesses in India and unveiled a roadmap for reciprocal tariffs on countries that put duties on U.S. imports.
"Prime Minister Modi recently announced the reductions to India s unfair, very strong tariffs that limit us access to the Indian market, very strongly," Trump said.
The deal to resolve trade concerns could be done within the next seven months, said India s Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri.
A joint statement after the meeting said Washington welcomed New Delhi s recent steps to lower tariffs on select U.S. products and increase market access to U.S. farm products, while seeking to negotiate the initial segments of a trade deal by the fall of 2025.
India wants to increase by "billions of dollars" its purchases of U.S. defense equipment and may make Washington the "number one supplier" of oil and gas, Trump said at a joint press conference with Modi.
And Delhi wants to double trade with Washington by 2030, Modi said. Long-planned cooperation on nuclear energy, also discussed by the leaders, faces ongoing legal challenges.
"We re also paving the way to ultimately provide India with the F-35 stealth fighters," said Trump.
Misri, the Indian official, later said the F-35 deal was a proposal at this point, with no formal process underway. The White House did not respond to a request for comment on any deal.
WHAT TRUMP WANTS
Although Trump had a warm relationship with Modi in his first term, he again said on Thursday that India s tariffs were "very high" and promised to match them, even after his earlier levies on steel and aluminum hit metal-producing India particularly hard.
"One thing that I deeply appreciate, and I learn from President Trump, is that he keeps the national interest supreme," Modi said. "Like him, I also keep the national interest of India at the top of everything else."
The two leaders praised each other and agreed to deepen security cooperation in the Indo-Pacific, a thinly veiled reference to competition with China, as well as to start joint production on technologies like artificial intelligence.
India s energy purchases from the U.S. could go up to $25 billion in the near future from $15 billion last year, India s Misri said, adding that this could contribute to reducing the trade deficit.
Tariffs will continue to dominate the two countries relationship, said Richard Rossow, head of the India program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank.
The U.S. has a $45.6 billion trade deficit with India. Overall, the U.S. trade-weighted average tariff rate has been about 2.2%, according to World Trade Organization data, compared with India s 12%.
FIGHT ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION
Trump wants more help from India on unauthorized immigration. India is a major source of immigrants to the United States, including a large number in the tech industry on work visas and others in the U.S. illegally.
The joint statement said the two countries agreed to aggressively address illegal immigration and human trafficking by strengthening law enforcement cooperation.
Modi also worries that Trump could cut a deal with China that excludes India, according to Mukesh Aghi, president of the U.S.-India Strategic Partnership Forum lobbying group.
India has continued its ties with Russia as it carries out its war with Ukraine. India has remained a major consumer of Russian energy, for instance, while the West has worked to cut its own consumption since the war started.
"The world had this thinking that India somehow is a neutral country in this whole process," said Modi. "But this is not true. India has a side, and that side is of peace."
