New Delhi

An official Indian delegation will travel to Washington, D.C. next week for trade negotiations with United States authorities, an official source said on Wednesday.

The bilateral talks are considered significant as India and the US have already finalised the framework for an interim trade agreement.

According to the source, the team is scheduled to visit next week to continue discussions.

The agreement was initially expected to be signed in March, but developments in the US tariff regime following a ruling by the Supreme Court of the United States changed the situation.

Officials had earlier indicated that the pact would be signed once America’s new global tariff framework became clear.

In February, India and the US announced that they had finalised the first-phase framework of a bilateral trade agreement. Under that arrangement, the US had reportedly agreed to reduce tariffs on Indian goods to 18 per cent.

However, the trade landscape shifted after the court ruling against sweeping reciprocal tariffs proposed by Donald Trump.

Subsequently, the US administration imposed a 10 per cent tariff on all countries for 150 days beginning February 24.

Because of these changes, a planned meeting between the chief negotiators of both countries was postponed last month. The two sides had been expected to meet in February to finalise the legal text of the agreement.

Earlier, India was seen as having a comparative tariff advantage over competing exporters. With the new universal 10 per cent tariff, all US trading partners are now subject to the same baseline rate.

Next week’s talks are also important because the US is conducting two investigations under Section 301.

On March 12, the United States Trade Representative launched a Section 301 probe involving 60 economies, including India and China, examining whether failures to ban imports made with forced labour unfairly burden US commerce.

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A day earlier, the USTR also initiated another Section 301 investigation into industrial and trade practices of 16 economies, again including India and China.