U.S. President Donald Trump has hailed the trade deal with India as “historic” and said America will increase its coal exports dramatically to the country and to others with which it has trade agreements.

“And under our leadership, we’re becoming a massive energy exporter. In just the past few months, we’ve made historic trade deals with Japan, Korea, India and others to increase our coal exports dramatically,” Mr. Trump said Wednesday (February 11, 2025) during an event titled ‘Champion of Coal’.

“We’re now exporting coal all over the world, and the quality of our coal is supposed to be…the finest anywhere in the world,” he said.

Last week, the U.S. and India announced they have reached a framework for an interim agreement on trade, under which New Delhi will eliminate or reduce tariffs on all American industrial goods, a wide range of food and agricultural products, as well as purchase $500 billion of US products over the next five years.

A joint statement issued by the two countries on Friday (February 6) said they have reached a framework “regarding reciprocal and mutually beneficial trade.”

It said that India “intends to purchase $500 billion of U.S. energy products, aircraft and aircraft parts, precious metals, technology products, and coking coal over the next five years.”

It added that the framework reaffirms the countries’ commitment to the broader U.S.-India Bilateral Trade Agreement (BTA) negotiations, launched by President Trump and Prime Minister Narendra Modi on February 13, 2025, which will include additional market access commitments and support more resilient supply chains.

The U.S. has said it is “very excited” to have extended an invitation to India to join the Pax Silica initiative on supply chain security and will be soon signing with the Indian government, underlining there is “very positive momentum” in relations with New Delhi.

Highlighting the “great relationship” between U.S. President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Washington also stressed that India is probably the only other country on Earth to be able to “rival China” in terms of the sheer volume of its human talent. “We are very excited to have extended an invitation for India to join” Pax Silica, and “I’ll be travelling to India in just a couple weeks for a major signing with the Indian government,” Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs Jacob Helberg told reporters on Friday (February 6, 2026).

The U.S. had last year in December launched ‘Pax Silica’, a strategic initiative to build a secure, prosperous, and innovation driven silicon supply chain—from critical minerals and energy inputs to advanced manufacturing, semiconductors, AI infrastructure, and logistics. The signatories are Australia, Greece, Israel, Japan, Qatar, South Korea, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom. India was not included in the initial group of countries for the Pax Silica initiative. 

Mr. Helberg added that while the Pax Silica was launched in December, and by January, the U.S. had “already had a meeting of the minds” around India joining Pax Silica. “And so we’re very pleased at the pace at which things have been moving in a very positive direction with our partners in India,” Mr. Helberg said during a briefing organised by the Washington Foreign Press Centre on the Critical Minerals Ministerial that the U.S. hosted last week.

 “India is also home to a large – very large mining and processing operations, which obviously holds great promise to make significant contributions to the supply chain ecosystem. And so there’s a lot of terrain in which we will be able to partner on with India,” he said.

Mr. Helberg further pointed out that outside of China, “India is probably the only other country on Earth to be able to rival China with respect to the breadth and depth of the sheer volume of young, technically trained talent, human talent.”  

“We view India very positively, and President Trump has a great relationship with [Prime Minister] Narendra Modi,” he added.

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Mr. Helberg also said that “we’re very excited and very proud about the bilateral trade deal being concluded with India.” Mr. Helberg’s comment about the trade deal came just hours before India and the U.S. issued a joint statement announcing that the two sides have reached a framework for an Interim Agreement regarding reciprocal and mutually beneficial trade.  Under the agreement, India will eliminate or reduce tariffs on all U.S. industrial goods and a wide range of U.S. food and agricultural products, including dried distillers’ grains, red sorghum for animal feed, tree nuts, fresh and processed fruit, soybean oil, wine and spirits, and additional products.

According to the joint statement, the U.S. will reduce tariffs on Indian goods to 18%. U.S. President Donald Trump also issued an Executive Order removing the punitive 25% tariffs imposed on India for its purchases of Russian oil.  Mr. Helberg further said that India and the United States are two very large countries, with America by far the world’s largest economy and India the world’s largest country demographically and a very young country, very fast-growing economy. “So for us to align on things, it takes a little bit more work because of the sheer size of our countries,” he said, responding to a question on the role the U.S. envisages for India in Pax Silica and why the country was not initially included in the initiative.

During the briefing, Mr. Helberg spoke about the inaugural Critical Minerals Ministerial meeting hosted in Washington on February 4, 2026 by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The ministerial brought together 55 delegations to explore ways to diversify and secure global critical minerals supply chains. External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar participated in the ministerial and, in his remarks, “underlined challenges of excessive concentration and the importance of de-risking supply chains through structured international cooperation.”