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USISPF President and CEO Mukesh Aghi on Monday (local time) confirmed that the high-stakes diplomatic visit, US Trade Representative Ambassador Jamieson Lee Greer's recent visit to India, from June 23 to 24, has yielded excellent groundwork for finalising an impending interim trade framework.
Addressing the IX USISPF Leadership Summit 2026, Aghi said, "We had lunch with Ambassador Jamieson Lee Greer, who just came back from India, to talk about the trade deal, and a lot of progress was made. Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Donald Trump have agreed to take the trade deal to USD 500 billion by 2030, and we are actively seeing that trade between the two countries is going up." Negotiations for an interim trade pact between India and the United States have achieved significant traction, following top-level deliberations at the IX US-India Strategic Partnership Forum (USISPF) Leadership Summit 2026. The annual conclave brought together Fortune 500 corporate leaders, senior policymakers, and diplomats to map out an ambitious roadmap aimed at swelling bilateral trade to a historic USD 500 billion by 2030. A central highlight of the summit was the closed-door briefing on the strategic visit of US Trade Representative (USTR) Ambassador Jamieson Lee Greer to India from June 23 to 24. Challenging standard bureaucratic approaches, USISPF Chairman John T Chambers urged both nations to leverage technology transformation and merge their strategic priorities to unlock unprecedented economic percentages. "Our countries have a chance to work together in ways we've never done before, but we can't do it in silos," Chambers emphasised in his address. "It can't be trade over here, defence over here, semiconductors over here. It's got to be; how do we think out of the box? And how do we, in my opinion, add 3 to 4 per cent to the GDP of India every year because of this partnership? And how do we add 1 to 2 per cent every year to the US that we would not get out of GDP growth? That's never been done before." Chambers warned that failure to recognise this cross-sector tech transformation would mean "missing an opportunity forever." The 2026 summit serves as a key platform for multi-sectoral coordination across critical minerals, supply chain resilience, and emerging tech corridors. The agenda features an economic and environmental fireside chat with US Under Secretary of State Jacob Helberg alongside a special political address by Congressman Ro Khanna. USISPF formally recognised three prominent corporate titans for driving economic synergy across the US, India, and Canada: Christopher Calio (President & Global CEO, RTX Corporation); Sunil Bharti Mittal (Founder & Chairman, Bharti Enterprises) and Prem Watsa (Chairman & CEO, Fairfax Financial Holdings) US Senators Steve Daines and Mark Warner received the Distinguished Public Service Award for their long-standing legislative support of the economic partnership. The forum also marked the launch of its commemorative coffee table book, 'We the People: A Tribute to the 250 Voices that Shaped the US-India Partnership', documenting the visionaries behind the modern alignment of the world's two largest democracies. (ANI)
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