📰Q&A with an Indian Minister of Commerce

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April 28, 2025

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Good evening, 

Welcome to the best way to stay up-to-date on India’s financial markets. Today, we discuss takeaways from the remarks given by the Union Minister of State for Commerce and Industry of India, Jitin Prasada, during an event on Friday night in New York directed towards U.S. professionals interested in Indian business.

Then, we close with Gupshup, a round-up of the most important headlines.

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—Shreyas, [email protected]

Market Update.

Q&A with Minister Jitin Prasada.

Samosa Capital attended an event with the Union Minister of State for Commerce, Jitin Prasada, in New York City. Here’s what you need to know:

India’s story. Prasada pitched India as a growing hub with a few different statistics. He sees Indian growth as important for the West by citing how the 1.4 billion population demands higher goods and is willing to pay the price. He cited a growing middle class with a 600 million-person labor force that had increased purchasing power. He next cited the great bonds between Modi and Trump, which have led to synergy; Prasada also sees global Indian immigrants as contributors to that bond. He also sees India as the talent capital of the world due to highly intelligent and skilled employees. 

Dataset: Prasada started talking more about AI and the JAM trinity in India. JAM is the number of bank accounts, Aadhar identification cards, and mobile connectivity levels. This high JAM count (553 million bank accounts, 1 billion ID cards, and 600 million smartphones) creates an insane dataset to empower technology growth. India’s semiconductor mission is expanding to the investment of $8.9 billion (₹760 billion) for manufacturing and reaching economies of scale. The investment is public and private, domestic and international, with the US. Prasada is also creating incentive programs to manufacture electronic components to the tune of $2.6 billion (₹220 billion).

India Consulate, New York

The biggest democracy: Prasada boasted about Modi’s third-term win by citing that this was a rare victory across so many states. Modi, having India’s mandate for 15 years, can make quick decisions, and that gives him an agile government. 

Trade agreements: Prasada mentioned continuous dialogue on trade agreements in New Zealand, the UK, the EU, and the US. He then focused on the US. He revealed that Modi and Trump worked out broad formalities and modalities of the trade agenda and that by September 4th, there will be the first branch of programs and policies. A specific talking point he brought up was COMPACT. In February, Modi and Trump created the acronym to represent tech, military, and commerce initiatives between the two nations. There will be a 10-year military plan, plus military sales to India and production material to the US. The private sector, with Anduril and Mahindra, plus L3 Harris and Bharat, will collaborate to create different military systems. 

Prasada then implored the crowd to speak to American and Indian government representatives to speak on their own trade recommendations. His belief is that business leaders who are bridging both economies can give specific agenda items that they want to see adjusted moving forward. This could be things like technology, farm goods, German jewelry, automobiles, and any other industry. 

More on tech: India wants to avoid overregulation to make sure that AI and quantum computing can flourish in the country. He wants to avoid certain losses like deep fakes, mass disruption, or chaos, but is prioritizing innovation. GPU use in India is going to be incentivized and subsidized by the government, making use cost less than a dollar (unclear exactly what this means,) making it the cheapest in the world. He also spoke about quantum qubits and various PLIs being developed for that mission. Admittedly, India is still behind on the quantum curve, but he wants to put India back at the forefront of that market as well. 

Supply chain growth. While the first few terms of Modi’s government were about infrastructure and transparency, the next term is about jobs and manufacturing. Textiles is a growing one that has been bottlenecked due to neighboring countries Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Vietnam, with regard to export amounts. India wants to ease manufacturing speed bumps. 

India also wants to build sustainable supply chains, but Prasada cautioned by saying that those decisions will be made without raising the cost of living on everyday Indians. He wants to continue to meet deadlines with the Paris Agreement and argued that India is the main contributor to global warming as of now.

India also has supply chains improving to make sure that there is compliance with the government, but also so that all exports have a high standard of quality. This means stringent QCO and audits, plus better manufacturing bases. India should be able to make goods for the domestic and international markets at a global quality. Additionally, foreign investment in almost all sectors makes it so that all types of factories can have the proper authenticity or recognition. 

While Samosa Capital has not always been positive on PLIs, Prasada was positive on them to improve revolutionary technology sales in the country. Additionally, handling initiatives are being taken up by the government to connect India with the globe in terms of pushing domestically produced goods across the world, but also in India itself. 

Importance of education: New adult tinkering labs will be available in every government school that has labs to begin research from a young age. Part of this investment will also come from the US and India, as Prasada explored on the West Coast.

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Gupshup.

Macro

Equities

Alts

Policy

  • India and the UK are arguing over a few trade points like carbon border taxes, data localization laws, and UK banks. These last-minute hurdles are not meant to derail talks, though there is no hard deadline to force both sides to reach agreements. The sticking points are: carbon taxes on weak climate environments like India; the RBI forces foreign finance providers to host data on local servers; the UK wants 70 British banks in India; small tax disputes; and Indian workers being exempt from the UK’s social security system if those workers also contribute to India’s pension system.  

  • Many companies are moving production to India, some even being Chinese. Apple’s move to all US iPhone production has already been heralded, but companies in China are liaising to move some production to India as well. The Canton Fair saw under-the-table negotiations to export goods from India, even if partly Chinese-manufactured.  

See you Tuesday.

Written by Yash Tibrewal. Edited by Shreyas Sinha.

Disclaimer: This is not financial advice or recommendation for any investment. The Content is for informational purposes only, you should not construe any such information or other material as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.