NEW DELHI: The US treats India at par with its NATO partners for sharing sensitive technologies and US technology exports to India that require special licences have dropped from 25% to 0.5% over the past 25 years, a senior American official said on Friday.
The US is working with partners such as India to ensure that Russia is unable to illegally use third countries to obtain items that the US and its allies have restricted under sanctions imposed following the invasion of Ukraine last year, said Thea Rozman Kendler, assistant secretary for export administration in the US department of commerce.
Kendler, who concluded a five-day visit to India on Friday, held meetings with officials and industry bodies to discuss dual-use export control issues and to prepare grounds for the inaugural US-India Strategic Trade Dialogue (USISTD) to be held in Washington in May.
At an interaction with a small group of journalists, Kendler said India’s accomplishments in strategic trade controls and high-tech trade help undergird shared security objectives. The inaugural strategic trade dialogue will serve as a building block for the initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology (iCET), which is aimed at fostering “open, accessible and secure trade”.
“We treat India as though we’re a NATO partner under our export controls…India as a major defence partner does receive benefits under our system that other countries do not receive,” she said.
“Our partnership is long and our progress has been steady. If you compare 25 years ago, in 1998, one-quarter of US exports to India required export licences from the US government. Now…only 0.5% of US exports to India require a licence,” she added.
This has happened, Kendler said, because India established strategic trade laws and effective regulations, and these robust strategic trade controls enable the US to “share technology that we can’t share with others”.
At the same time, Kendler highlighted US concerns about Russia’s possible use of third countries to circumvent sanctions aimed at curtailing Moscow’s ability to access critical technologies. “In my meetings, we also stressed the importance of protecting India’s trusted strategic trade controls environment,” she said.
In response to the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the US and its allies imposed stringent strategic trade controls on Russia and Belarus. “We also know, though, that Russia is illegally using third countries to obtain items that the US and these 38 other economies have restricted. We’re actively following the trade diversion and backfilling data very closely and taking responsive measures,” she added.
The US is looking at companies around the world being used by Russia to “facilitate its illicit procurement”. Kendler said: “We’re working with partners all over the world to make sure that Russia isn’t using them to backfill the technology.”
Kendler also spoke of the challenge posed by China’s “military-civil fusion strategy” in the sphere of advanced technologies.
“If you don’t know whether the [Chinese] government’s going to take over a technology if you don’t know whether the entity you’re shipping to is sharing that commercial technology with the military actor, it’s really difficult for industry and we want to make sure that we’re providing the best advice we can,” she said.
In this context, Kendler said the US has put in place regulations aimed at curtailing China’s acquisition and production of advanced integrated circuits that can be used in artificial intelligence, biotechnology, supercomputing, weapons modelling and data surveillance that violates human rights.
