New Delhi: India is desperate to convince the new US administration that it’s not a “tariff king”—but it looks like India might get hit anyway.
In Bloomberg, Andy Mukherjee writes that India might have cheered when Trump was elected, but now it’s worried. There’s been a “palpable lack of enthusiasm” from Trump’s side, he writes.
“Jitters about the US-India relationship had begun to replace complacency, with first signs of trouble showing up not in trade but immigration,” writes Mukherjee, even before the presidential inauguration. The MAGA camp was split over the H-1B issue, and suddenly the issue of high-skilled Indian immigration became a topic of national conversation.
The foreboding grew worse with Trump signing an executive order to end birthright citizenship on his first day in office, which has since been temporarily blocked. But this is just “white-collar angst”, writes Mukherjee. “At the other end of the immigration spectrum are undocumented workers.”
And we’re seeing the effects of that: on 5 February, the first flight of deported illegal immigrants—over a hundred ferried in a military plane—landed in Amritsar, a week before Modi is set to meet Trump. It shows Trump wants to “negotiate from a position of strength,” writes Mukherjee.
“India has already offered a concession by agreeing to work with the White House to take back its undocumented workers, despite the political embarrassment the government will face back home. Every incoming flight of deportees would shine a spotlight on the Modi administration’s record of employment creation: Why are so many Indians desperate to leave the world’s fastest-growing major economy? Don’t they have jobs at home?” asks Mukherjee. “That’s just one of the aces the US president holds as he looks to play trade and immigration policy cards to bargain for greater access for the likes of Walmart Inc. to the Indian market.”
New Delhi obviously wants a few things in return—like perhaps glossing over the US Justice Department’s indictment of Gautam Adani over bribery, or the allegations of the Indian government organising a murder-for-hire plot on US soil.
“Trouble is, nobody can predict if the concessions currently on the table will be enough, or whether the White House will ask for more,” writes Mukherjee. “Even as the world’s largest economy lurches toward Trump’s ‘America First’ brand of protectionism, it’s making smaller economies open up. That may not be a bad thing altogether.”
The Washington Post reports on OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s visit to India this week, amid a protracted legal fight in India.
“The lawsuit is led by one of the country’s largest news wires and has united players across a diverse, often fragmented Indian media landscape. Mirroring similar legal challenges facing the company worldwide, the suit alleges that OpenAI has illegally used copyrighted content to train the algorithms that power its popular chatbots,” the Post reports.
The lawsuit, filed by ANI, argues that OpenAI “operates as an unfair competitor”. ANI launched its legal challenge in November—and newspapers like the Indian Express and Hindustan Times have tried to join it—around the same time that a group of Canadian news organisations filed a similar lawsuit. The New York Times has also filed a copyright infringement suit in 2023, as well as eight other US newspapers.
“Courts and governments around the world are scrambling to set boundaries around the development of generative AI, which is developed by running complex algorithms on huge datasets often taken from the public internet. OpenAI could face a particularly acute challenge in India, analysts say, because copyright laws here provide content creators with stronger protections than in the United States,” the article says.
Altman is in India as part of a larger Asia tour—he was just in Japan, and will now be heading to Paris to attend an AI summit co-chaired by Modi. His stop in India could be part of an effort to “convince the country to move in the direction of Japan and Singapore, where there have been new legal carve-outs for the company’s algorithmic training.”
“The global charm offensive by OpenAI” coincides with the unexpected release of Chinese company DeepSeek’s chatbot, reports the Post.
“In considering the ANI case, India’s judiciary must wrestle with fundamental questions about the future of AI, legal experts say, in ways that go beyond the American legal challenges,” the Post reports.
The Financial Times reports on what seems like an unsolvable problem in India’s biggest cities: what to do when rain brings the entire city to a standstill?
Every year, FT reports, Mumbai “buckles beneath a torrential onslaught of summer rain that drenches the city and churns up the streets”. The monsoon is a “season that brings the megacity’s overburdened infrastructure close to collapse.”
But this year, Mumbai will put this “annual destruction” to an end. There are plans to build a $700 million drive to pave around 400kms of Mumbai’s roads with sturdier, monsoon-resistant concrete: “It is the city’s largest civic contract on record and aims to end the relentless cycle of potholes and repairs,” FT reports.
“Although work got off to a slow start, the city is now tearing itself apart. A record outlay, coinciding with post-pandemic real estate expansion, has resulted in a construction and resurfacing boom that has left Mumbai in a state of disarray. Across the city barricades bearing the words “Mumbai is upgrading” and “Inconvenience regretted” surround newly cratered roads and pavements,” FT reports.
But of course, the construction comes with a high cost: the traffic congestion and poor implementation of pollution control measures are now a huge nuisance to the city.
“The true test will arrive in a few months when the rains begin. Until then, the city will keep on digging. Returning from a short trip last month, I discovered a deep new trench had been opened up outside my home. All that passers-by can do is follow the directions of the surrounding yellow barrier that warns them: “Be nimble, be cautious, this is Mumbai my love!” writes the FT’s correspondent, Chris Kay.
Also read: Why India is falling behind in its ‘own backyard’ & Indians are praying to ‘H-1B gods’