8 active areas of cooperation, as of 17 January 2025. Click any card for the full brief.
01 DEFENCE & SECURITY DEEP
Major Defence Partnership Defence cooperation was almost unthinkable for most of the Cold War, when India's non-alignment and close Soviet ties kept Washington and New Delhi at arm's length; India's May 1998 nuclear tests briefly pushed them further apart under a US sanctions regime. The real turning point was the Jaswant Singh-Strobe Talbott dialogue (1998-2000), President Clinton's reset-defining 2000 visit, and the removal of sanctions in 2001 - all setting up the 2005 US-India Civil Nuclear Agreement, which recast the relationship from technology denial to technology partnership and made a defence relationship politically possible for the first time.
From that base, the 'New Framework for India-US Defence Relations' (first signed 2005, renewed 2015) and the 2016 Major Defence Partner designation formalised deepening ties, unlocked by a sequence of foundational agreements - LEMOA (2016), COMCASA (2018), ISA (2019) and BECA (2020) - that enabled logistics-sharing, secure communications and geospatial-intelligence exchange comparable to what the US extends to treaty allies. Defence procurement scaled up in parallel, covering C-130J and C-17 transports, Apache and Chinook helicopters, MH-60R and P-8I maritime platforms, cumulatively exceeding $20 billion; joint exercises multiplied (Yudh Abhyas, Vajra Prahar, Malabar, Cope India, Tiger Triumph) to the point that India is now the US military's largest exercise partner, and India joined the Combined Maritime Forces in Bahrain in 2022.
The apex 2+2 Ministerial Dialogue (5th edition, November 2023) now sets overall strategy, the MQ-9B Reaper drone deal was signed in October 2024, and INDUS-X (launched June 2023) has become the main vehicle for defence-industrial and startup collaboration - together marking a relationship that has moved from near-total estrangement to one of the US's closest defence partnerships in barely two and a half decades.
MDP 2+2 DIALOGUE
Read brief → 02 COUNTER-TERRORISM & SECURITY ACTIVE
Institutionalised security cooperation Counter-terrorism cooperation traces back to the aftermath of 9/11 and, more decisively, the November 2008 Mumbai attacks, which underscored shared exposure to transnational terrorism originating from South Asia and gave both governments a concrete reason to institutionalise intelligence-sharing beyond ad hoc contacts.
The India-US Joint Working Group on Counter Terrorism, running since the mid-2000s, was reinforced from 2017 with a sharper focus on information exchange, capacity building, and coordinated terrorist-designation efforts at the UN; a parallel Homeland Security Dialogue, running since 2010, built out sub-groups on immigration, cyber security and transportation security. The most recent JWG-CT/Designations Dialogue meeting was held in 2025. Narcotics cooperation expanded into its own track more recently, with a Counter Narcotics Working Group (5th meeting, October 2024) and a new US-India Drug Policy Framework for the 21st Century signed in September 2024 addressing the fentanyl and synthetic-opioid precursor trade.
Current cooperation spans a cybercrime MoU signed January 2025, India's role in the US-led Global Coalition on Synthetic Drugs, and continued designation-dialogue and capacity-building work - now one of the more institutionalised, if lower-profile, tracks of the relationship.
03 TRADE & ECONOMIC RELATIONS DEEP
India's largest trading partner Economic ties opened up only after India's 1991 balance-of-payments crisis forced a break from decades of licence-raj protectionism; American investment and IT-outsourcing demand were among the first beneficiaries of that liberalisation through the 1990s, laying the groundwork for a trade relationship that the political estrangement of the Cold War years had kept artificially small.
Growth accelerated through the 2000s and 2010s on the back of the reset in political relations, with the Trade Policy Forum (established 2005, now in its 14th edition as of January 2024), the Commercial Dialogue, CEO Forum, ICT Working Group, and Economic and Financial Partnership Dialogue building an increasingly dense institutional architecture. India joined the US-led Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) in 2022 and signed its Pillar-2 supply-chain agreement (in force from February 2024) plus Pillar-3 (clean economy) and Pillar-4 (fair economy) agreements ahead of PM Modi's September 2024 Washington visit.
The US is now India's largest trading partner, with total goods-and-services trade of $190.1 billion in calendar year 2023, and the third-largest source of FDI into India in FY2023-24 ($4.99 billion, about 9% of total FDI equity inflows) - a reversal of flow direction is also underway, with over 163 Indian companies having invested more than $40 billion in the US, supporting over 425,000 American jobs.
LARGEST PARTNER IPEF
Read brief → 04 ENERGY & CLIMATE ACTIVE
Strategic Clean Energy Partnership Energy cooperation grew out of the 2005 Civil Nuclear Agreement's broader opening of technology and energy ties, but took its current climate-focused shape only after both countries set ambitious net-zero-adjacent targets in the run-up to COP26 - India committing to net zero by 2070, the US rejoining the Paris Agreement under the Biden administration.
The India-US Climate and Clean Energy Agenda 2030 Partnership, launched April 2021, structured cooperation into two tracks: the Strategic Clean Energy Partnership (covering power efficiency, renewables, oil and gas, sustainable growth and emerging fuels across five pillars) and the Climate Action and Finance Mobilization Dialogue. The Renewable Energy Technology Action Platform (RETAP), launched August 2023, added lab-to-lab research collaboration, and a $1 billion multilateral financing commitment plus an IBRD guarantee facility (signed November 2024) backed the US-India Roadmap for clean-energy supply chains.
Traditional hydrocarbons trade remains substantial alongside the newer clean-energy tracks - the US is India's sixth-largest energy trade partner, with hydrocarbons trade of $13.6 billion in FY2023-24 - making energy one of the few areas of the relationship spanning both legacy oil-and-gas trade and frontier clean-technology collaboration simultaneously.
05 SCIENCE, TECH & SPACE DEEP
iCET and civil space cooperation Civil space cooperation is the oldest strand of this pillar, dating to a 1978 NASA-ISRO agreement and deepening through decades of earth-observation data-sharing, long before the current strategic-technology framework existed. Technology cooperation more broadly stayed limited by export-control regimes for years, even as the broader relationship warmed after 2005.
That changed with the Initiative for Critical and Emerging Technologies (iCET), launched January 2023 by the two National Security Advisors, which deliberately targets a wider band of frontier technology - AI, quantum computing, telecom, semiconductors and biotech - than earlier space- or defence-specific tracks; its second Summit was held in New Delhi in July 2024. On the space side specifically, ISRO and NASA are jointly developing the NISAR earth-observation satellite through the Civil Space Joint Working Group, and signed a Strategic Framework for human spaceflight cooperation in 2024, under which ISRO-nominated astronauts have trained in the US for the Axiom-4 mission to the ISS.
India's GSAT-20 satellite launched on a SpaceX Falcon-9 in November 2024 - a symbolically significant moment marking commercial US-India space collaboration alongside the older government-to-government NASA-ISRO track, with iCET now providing an overarching framework tying space, AI and semiconductor cooperation together.
06 HEALTH DEEP
Pharma supply chain and pandemic cooperation Health cooperation is built on a decades-long pharmaceutical trade relationship: India's generics industry, built up from the 1970s under a patent regime that allowed process-patent manufacturing, became a major global supplier by the 1990s and found in the US - the world's largest pharmaceutical market - its single most important export destination.
That commercial relationship deepened into formal government-to-government health cooperation through the India-US Health Dialogue (now in its 5th edition, October 2023), covering pandemic preparedness, digital health, vaccine development and traditional medicine, and through the Cancer Moonshot initiative joined in June 2023, which runs a dedicated joint India-US Cancer Dialogue. The COVID-19 pandemic underscored the scale of pharmaceutical interdependence, with India supplying vaccines and generics globally even as US-India vaccine and API supply-chain cooperation intensified.
India now has the largest number of USFDA-compliant manufacturing plants outside the US (858+), and Indian companies supplied 47% of all generic prescriptions filled in the US in 2022 (1.8 of 6.7 billion prescriptions), contributing an estimated $219 billion of the $408 billion in generic-drug savings that year - a figure projected to reach $1.3 trillion in cumulative US healthcare savings over the next five years.
GENERICS USFDA PLANTS
Read brief → 07 EDUCATION & CULTURE ACTIVE
Fulbright-Nehru ties and student mobility Academic exchange is one of the oldest continuous threads in the relationship, anchored by the Fulbright programme's India component - the Fulbright-Nehru scheme, one of the largest Fulbright partnerships in the world - which has sent students and scholars in both directions since the early Cold War era even when broader political relations were cool.
Student mobility grew enormously from the 1990s onward as Indian STEM graduates increasingly pursued US graduate education, a flow that both reflected and reinforced the two countries' deepening technology ties; the Global Initiative of Academic Networks (GIAN), launched in 2015, added a mechanism for visiting international faculty (including from the US) to teach short courses at Indian institutions, and a dedicated Working Group on Education and Skill Development launched in May 2023 to formalise institutional partnerships and vocational training cooperation. Cultural-heritage cooperation matured in parallel, culminating in the first-ever US-India Cultural Property Agreement signed in July 2024 to curb antiquities trafficking.
About 331,600 Indian students studied in the US in 2023-24, mostly in STEM graduate programmes, contributing an estimated $8 billion annually to the US economy; on repatriation, 297 antiquities were returned to India in 2024 alone, taking the cumulative total since 2016 to 578 artefacts.
FULBRIGHT-NEHRU 331K STUDENTS
Read brief → 08 DIASPORA DEEP
5.4 million-strong community Indian migration to the US began in meaningful numbers only after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 abolished national-origin quotas, opening the door to skilled professionals - engineers, doctors, and later software professionals - who built the foundation of today's community over the following six decades.
That community grew fastest from the 1990s IT boom onward, as H-1B visas and offshore-outsourcing ties between Indian IT firms and US corporations created a steady pipeline of skilled migration, reinforced by growing numbers of Indian students staying on after graduate study. Political representation followed the community's growth: as of the mid-2020s six members of Indian origin sit in the US Congress, and diaspora engagement has become a fixture of every prime ministerial visit.
The community now numbers about 5.4 million Indian Americans/persons of Indian origin (including 2.07 million NRIs), the third-largest Asian ethnic group in the US. Consular infrastructure has expanded to match: new Indian consulates in Boston and Los Angeles were announced in September 2024, and the US opened a new consulate in Bengaluru in January 2025 - taking the diplomatic footprint on both sides to its widest point yet.
5.4M DIASPORA NEW CONSULATES
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