WASHINGTON: The India-US relationship is increasingly anchored in innovation and talent, and people are one of the “strongest bridges” of the bilateral ties, Union Minister Jayant Chaudhary said here.
In a video message to the Hopkins India Conference 2026 here on Wednesday, Chaudhary said the promise of India-US leadership in technology will ultimately depend on how much and how well the two nations invest in their people.
“One of our strongest bridges is our people. With over 300,000 Indian students in the US, alongside a dynamic flow of researchers and professionals in both directions, we are seeing a powerful exchange of knowledge and skills. This movement of talent is not incidental,” the Minister for Skill Development said at the two-day conference organised by the Gupta-Klinsky India Institute at Johns Hopkins University.
Addressing the gathering, Namgya C Khampa, Deputy Chief of Mission at the Indian Embassy in Washington, DC, said the Indian-origin community in the US was six million strong and deeply embedded in sectors such as technology, business, academia and public life.
“This community is not just a very successful living bridge, but it is a force multiplier that few bilateral relationships can match, and a reservoir of strength and goodwill for building the bilateral partnership between India and the United States,” she said.
Khampa said what was once a careful, sometimes hesitant engagement has evolved into a partnership that is now central to how both countries envision the world around them, driven by intersecting interests in economic, strategic, security, and technological sectors.
The senior diplomat said India and the US are not necessarily identical in outlook, nor do the two countries approach every issue in the same way.
“But where our interests converge, and there are many overlapping areas of convergent interests, they do so with increasing clarity and greater impact,” she said.
Khampa cited areas such as ensuring stability in the Indo-Pacific, building trusted and resilient technologies and ecosystems, strengthening supply chains, or taking on international terrorism.
"Equally important is a recognition that a partnership of this scale will have its differences. There will be differing perspectives from time to time on trade, on regulatory approaches, or specific sectoral interests,” she said.
“What serves both sides well is, however, that we have, over decades, built mechanisms and built resilience that allow us to manage these differences without derailing broader cooperation,” Khampa said.