Many agreements signed during the pandemic, says Amb. Luca
Italy and India are entering a new phase of relations to transform their partnership to ideally benefit from their economic, innovations and technological complementarity after the successful virtual bilateral summit between their Prime Ministers on 5 November 2020.
“We were able to finalise a number of agreements not only on G2G, but also with the private sector. This only goes on to show how the two countries want to transform their partnership to ideally benefit from their economic, innovations and technological complementarity,” Italian Ambassador in New Delhi Vincenzo de Luca at a curtain raiser “Diplomacy Unplugged”, a dialogue series between India and partnering nations initiated by FICCI on 13 Jan 2021.
“The two countries also share a global agenda,” he added.
Further on the existing relations between both the countries, Amb. Luca said that the two countries have signed many important agreements during the pandemic.
“This was also the first time that a new five-year plan of action had been decided to deepen cooperation in the domain of culture, innovation and technology with the Indian government.
“The comprehensive partnership between India and Italy helps the companies to be more confident about investment in the two countries,” he informed.
“We are experiencing a momentum for a very important breakthrough relationship between both the countries after a period of less intense dialogue. Over the last three years we have increased the bilateral trade by 22%. This is a remarkable progress,” the Italian envoy underlined.
Separately, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) has given out lines of credit of US$6.5 billion, US$700 million of grants and over 50,000 scholarships to African students after the India-Africa Summit, Rahul Chhabra, MEA Secretary (Economic Relations), told the dialogue.
The MEA has been working on development partnerships with various countries and has started various initiatives as well as was continuing its human-centric globalisation and welfare program with partnering countries, he said.
“We have been trying to finalise migration and mobility agreements with partnering countries. This pandemic threw up the issue of global shortage of trained manpower in various sectors that the MEA has taken note of,” said Chhabra.
“We have also started getting the states involved in our outreach in terms of promoting exports and incoming foreign business delegation. Not just in terms of cooperative federalism, we are also looking at competitive federalism,” he further added.
The MEA has enhanced the trade promotion budget along with promoting study in India in various countries.
“The MEA has been providing funding for trade fairs and exhibitions and for number of targeted initiatives to Indian missions across regions,” added Chhabra. #economic #investment #technology #innovations /fiinews.com
