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India has proposed a preferential trade agreement (PTA) with Mexico to help domestic exporters deal with the steep tariffs announced by the South American country, a top government official said on Monday. Mexico has decided to impose steep import tariffs - ranging from about 5 per cent to as high as 50 per cent on a wide range of goods (about 1,463 tariff lines) from countries that do not have free trade agreements with Mexico, including India, China, South Korea, Thailand and Indonesia. Commerce Secretary Rajesh Agrawal said that India has engaged with the country on the issue. "Technical level talks are on...The only fast way forward is to try to get a preferential trade agreement (PTA) because an FTA (free trade agreement) will take a lot of time. So we are trying to see what can be a good way forward," he told reporters here. While in an FTA two trading partners either significantly reduce or eliminate import duties on maximum number of goods traded between them, in a PTA, dut
A delegation led by Deputy US Trade Representative (USTR) Rick Switzer will meet his Indian counterpart Rajesh Agarwal on the proposed bilateral trade agreement here this week, official sources said. The USA's chief negotiator for the pact, Assistant US Trade Representative for South and Central Asia Brendan Lynch, will hold discussions with India's chief negotiator and Joint Secretary in the Department of Commerce Darpan Jain. "A delegation from the office of the US Trade Representative, led by Deputy US Trade Representative Ambassador Rick Switzer, will be visiting India from December 9-11, 2025. Talks on 10th and 11th will happen on all trade-related issues," they said. The visit is crucial as India and the US are working to finalise the first tranche of the pact. This visit of the US officials marks their second trip since the imposition of a 25 per cent tariff and an additional 25 per cent penalty on Indian goods entering the American market due to the purchase of Russian crud
Telecom industry body COAI has defended service providers' call to increase mobile tariff citing continuous widening of gap between their expense on network deployment and revenue earned by them in return. While speaking at India Mobile Congress, Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI), Director General, SP Kochhar told PTI that the government has supported a lot to telecom operators with policies like right of way (RoW) but still several authorities continue to charge exorbitant fees for laying network elements. "Earlier, the gap until 2024 for infrastructure development and revenue received from tariffs was around Rs 10,000 crore. Now it has started increasing even further. Our cost of rolling out networks should be reduced by a reduction in the price of spectrum, levies etc. "The Centre has come out with a very good ROW policy. It is a different matter that many people have not yet fallen in line and are still charging extremely high," Kochhar said. He defended the cut do