American businesses looking at India as a place where they can diversify their supply chains: US Congressman

American businesses are looking at India as a place where they can diversify their supply chains, an influential US lawmaker has said on the eve of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s maiden state visit at the invitation of President Joe Biden.

India and the US have an enormous ability to cooperate on technology and innovation, and this is partly because of the diaspora, Indian-American Congressman Ro Khanna said on Tuesday in his keynote address to the inaugural INDUS-X conference. It used to be that being Indian-American was a challenge and rising up the corporate hierarchy, he said at the event organised by US-India Business Council in partnership with the Department of Defence and India’s Department of Defence Production.

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“Now, and I’m joking, you almost have to be Indian-American to run one of these tech companies. It’s come a long way, but that provides a huge opportunity to cooperate on critical research, AI, on critical research, on climate, on critical cooperation, and helping foster a manufacturing renaissance in the US and making sure manufacturing is taking place in India as opposed to China for the Asia hub,” Khanna said. “I mean (Apple’s) Tim Cook in my (Congressional) district, I mean, he is talking about going to India. Everyone in the Valley and other parts of the business world are looking at India as a place where they can diversify their supply chains,” said the Indian-American lawmaker who represents Silicon Valley in the US House of Representatives.

Khanna in his remarks noted the popularity of Prime Minister Modi in the US. “l will tell you what the mark of how far we came when the British Prime Minister came here post-Brexit, no one really cared. No one paid attention. And when the Indian Prime Minister is coming, the entire Congress is the hottest ticket in town. Now, if you had told my grandfather that the Indian Prime Minister is going to way outshine the British Prime Minister, that would not have been a likely story,” he said. Noting that both India and the US are imperfect democracies, he said no one would describe America these days as a perfect democracy. One just has to see the gun shootings, and voting rights and one has to look at the challenges the US faces, he added.

“Similarly, India is a growing democracy that has its own challenges to make sure that we respect pluralism and respect human rights. But the key thing to democracies is to be honest, unlike authoritarian regimes about our aspirations,” he said. “And our aspirations, I firmly believe, of both countries is to be liberal, pluralistic countries, nations that work together to see a more peaceful world,” Khanna said.