Indian Trade Minister says negotiations with the US are heading in the right direction and the first phase has been finalised, currently undergoing legal drafting

Phased trade deals of this kind have followed a familiar sequence: a political announcement of agreement in principle, a legal drafting and scrubbing phase, a signing ceremony, and only later the published schedules that allow the tariff and market-access details to be priced properly. Headlines at the drafting stage have historically produced the smallest and least durable FX reaction, since nothing is yet enforceable and phases have been known to stall or be re-scoped before signature; the repricing, when it comes, tends to arrive with the text. The transmission channel here runs through India's tariff differential on US goods and any reciprocal concessions, which feeds INR primarily via expectations for trade balances and portfolio flows rather than through the broad dollar, so DXY relevance is limited. What separates a durable move from a fade is whether the first phase covers the contentious items, typically agriculture, digital trade and tariffs, or defers them to later phases, which has been the pattern in past bilateral deals structured this way. The follow-ons worth noting are the signing timeline, publication of the legal text, and any parallel statements from the US side, since divergent characterisations between negotiating parties have been a recurring feature of these processes. As a ministerial comment rather than a signed document, this is direction-setting rather than confirmation.