Bengaluru Airport Smuggling Case: Tarun Konduru Raju, belonging to a prominent Bengaluru business family, was arrested based on information from Ranya Rao. 

India says it has not committed to slashing import duties on US products, days after President Donald Trump announced that New Delhi had agreed to “cut their tariffs way down”.

Only weeks into his second term, Trump has upended global trade, targeting friends and foes alike. He has also blamed all trading partners of “unfair” practices, and has announced reciprocal tariffs on many countries, including India, to begin from next month.

Trump once again railed at India’s “massive tariffs” last week.

“You can’t sell anything into India, it is almost restrictive,” Trump said.

“They have agreed, by the way, they want to cut their tariffs way down now because somebody is finally exposing them for what they have done,” he added.

But the Indian government told a parliamentary panel that “no commitments had been made to the US on the issue,” a report in The Times of India newspaper said Tuesday.

The government “has sought time until September to address the issue that is being repeatedly flagged by the American president,” it added.

India’s commerce secretary Sunil Barthwal “said that India and the US were working towards a mutually beneficial bilateral trade agreement, focusing on long-term trade cooperation instead of merely seeking immediate tariffs adjustments”.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who visited the White House last month, has an acknowledged rapport with Trump, who said he shares a “special bond” with the Indian leader.

PM Modi said the world’s largest and fifth-largest economies would work on a “mutually beneficial trade agreement” to be sealed “very soon”.

While the United States is a crucial market for India’s information technology and services sectors, Washington has made billions of dollars in new military hardware sales to New Delhi in recent years.

Trump could visit India later this year for a summit of heads of state from the Quad — a four-way grouping of Australia, India, Japan and the United States.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Amid a nationwide debate on work-life balance, the wife of a GST official, who jumped to death from his Noida flat yesterday, has said he was under work pressure and that he was a “victim of the system”. Earlier, police had said Sanjay Singh, 59, had been fighting cancer for the past five years and the harrowing struggle had led to depression. The cops had said that the family had told them that the cancer fight may have pushed him to the edge.

Mrs Singh has trashed these claims in an interaction with the media and said that Sanjay Singh was a “survivor” and that his cancer was “not life-threatening”. “He got my father-in-law and my sister-in-law treated. His cancer was not life-threatening, never. He was under a lot of pressure at work. Maybe his department colleagues would know better,” she said.

Sanjay Singh, 59, was a deputy commissioner in the GST department in Ghaziabad. He jumped to death from his 14th-floor flat at Apex Athena, a residential complex in Noida’s Sector 75, around 11 am yesterday. He is survived by his wife and two sons. His elder son works in Gurugram and the younger son is a dentistry student at Sharda University.

“We did not fear anything like this. This is not normal. He became a victim of the system. If anyone can answer these questions, they can speak to me,” she said.

Mrs Singh also rubbished reports that said her husband’s prostrate cancer had advanced to the last stage. “May God forgive them. I cannot silence everyone. My husband was not a fourth-stage cancer patient and I have proof of this. Whatever has happened, the system is responsible. This must be investigated,” she said.

According to reports, Sanjay Singh was posted at the GST office in Ghaziabad’s Rajendra Nagar and had been handling Supreme Court cases.

An organisation representing tax officials in Uttar Pradesh has called upon its members to wear black bands to protest Sanjay Singh’s

death. In a statement, the UP Rajya Kar Adhikari Seva Sangh has accused the administration of “highhandedness” and alleged that employees were being asked to work on off days and finish time-barred cases before deadlines. The employees’ union has also alleged threats of termination. “There is disappointment among officials as they fear mistakes due to work pressure,” it said. The organisation said it would stage a mass casual leave protest after Holi.