Ruling out tariff cause

Apropos of the news report ‘India trying to reach understanding with US on the issues that led to tariffs: Jaishankar’ (October 6), it emanated from the speeches and statements of the US President Trump that the tariffs and penalty were imposed on India beyond reasons of the trade deficit and for India-Russia oil supplies.

India-Russia relations are sacrosanct and have been unconditional even when India-US relations and co-operation were on high.

So the US has no reason for diplomatic or trade envy on India-Russia bonhomie. At any cost, India will never sacrifice the most trusted ally Russia which never ditched when India was in crisis. This is also our red line.

Trump must be explained that the US has a trade surplus with India on Intellectual property rights, students fee and visa, and billions of revenue generated by its companies.

If the US has drawn its red lines for itself, it must also respect others’ red lines.

For MAGA, saga of Indian growth must also sustain.

Vinod Johri

New Delhi

Reorienting IT sector

Apropos Editorial ‘Digital Swaraj’ (October 6), it is rightly highlighted the need for IT companies in India to switch over from vendor-client centric model of doing back office related jobs to become an innovation hub, develop new systems, applications and products to be made available in global platform.

This requires lot of R&D, pool of skilled and talented resources, to develop, test and launch it for global use. The applications developed must have the properties of scalability, capacity to handle the surge in the hits, embedded security features and equal hardware capacity besides its seamless handshake with other systems. They can take the cue for designing, from the success of UPI architecture which is now capable of porting it to countries outside India.

This is a time-consuming task that serve India well going ahead.

RV Baskaran

Pune

Digital sovereignty

It is with reference to the Editorial ‘Digital swaraj’ (October 6). India’s growing dependence on foreign tech infrastructure, software, social platforms and cloud creates potential vulnerabilities for our economy and security. We can no longer remain dependent on foreign, especially on US technology in the current geopolitical situation. Tomorrow’s US policy decision could disrupt banking sector, payments even defence operation in India overnight. Strengthening indigenous capabilities in cloud services, AI and cybersecurity is no longer just an option but a necessity. Digital sovereignty for India is much more important than ever before in the history of modern technological landscape.

P Victor Selvaraj

Palayamkottai (TN)

Published on October 6, 2025