Biden-appointed US envoy in New Delhi echoes Trump on India's 'high tariff'

New Delhi: India is the ‘highest tariff’ major economy in the world, and, in order to make its bilateral trade with the United States fair and equal, the two nations need to work together to lower each other’s taxes on imports, Eric Garcetti, the outgoing envoy of Washington DC to New Delhi, said on Thursday.

Garcetti, appointed by outgoing US President Joe Biden, made the comment just days after Donald Trump, who would take over the Oval Office at the White House in Washington DC on January 20, threatened to impose retaliatory tariffs on imports from India, alleging that it charged a lot on exports from America.

While the relations between Washington DC and New Delhi have support from both Republicans and Democrats in the US, the back-to-back comments signalled bipartisan concerns in America on tariffs imposed by India.

New Delhi has already been worried about the possibility of the incoming Trump Administration pressing India harder to lower tariffs on exports from the US than the outgoing administration of Biden.

“Imagine what we could do if we actually sat down and had all these conversations...The US could say you might be down 95% from what tariffs used to be, but it's still the highest tariff major economy in the world, here in India. And too often, there are barriers that take too long and are too arbitrary, and everything from labour to land, as we have too in the United States,” Garcetti said on Thursday.

He was speaking at an event hosted by the US-India Business Council in New Delhi.

“We need, together, to lower tariffs, not to see them go up. We need, together, to increase trade and to make it more fair and equal. We need to, together, make sure that there’s training and talent that meets the needs of companies on both sides of the Indo-Pacific,” said Garcetti.

“The word reciprocal is important because if somebody charges us — India, we don't have to talk about our own — if India charges us 100 per cent, do we charge them nothing for the same?” Trump had recently said at a news conference in Mar-e-Lago in Florida. You know, they send in a bicycle, and we send them a bicycle. They charge us 100 and 200. India charges a lot. Brazil charges a lot. If they want to charge us, that's fine, but we're going to charge them the same thing,” Trump said at a news conference at Mar-a-Lago in Florida recently.

Garcetti on Thursday referred to Trump’s remarks.

“I think that as you hear, as recently as yesterday, President-elect Trump talk about trade and how tariffs need to be done fairly, let us have honest conversations. I think it's helpful for us to speak bluntly but let us use that as a starting point to negotiate much more deeply than we do,” the US Ambassador to India said.