Indo-Russian defence ties key element of strategic partnership: PM

St Petersburg, July 17 (UNI) Prime Minister Manmohan Singh today said the long-standing India-Russia defence ties were a key element of the strategic partnership between the two countries.

''Our long-standing defence cooperation underpins the strategic nature of our ties. Russia is the principal defence supplier to India and currently nearly 10 billion dollars worth of contracts are in various stages of being realised, he told Interfax news agency in a interview on the margins of G-8 summit.

He said the two sides were trying to expand further this defence cooperation beyond a buyer-seller relationship to joint research, design, development, production and marketing as well as closer military-to-military ties.

''The Brahmos missile is a fine example of what can be achieved by working jointly to produce state-of-the-art equipment,'' the Prime Minister pointed out, adding regular joint military exercises also reflected a broadening of the military-to-military relationship.

Dr Singh said that the agreement on protection of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) in the military-technical field, which was signed during his visit to Moscow in December 2005, would ''further enhance the quality of our future defence cooperation.'' He said the ''economic pillar of our strategic relationship'' needed attention, as at present it was not as strong as it should be.

''Our economy has registered good growth rates in recent years and so has the Russian economy. This should be reflected in the quality of our bilateral economic relations,'' he stressed.

''Our annual trade turnover currently stands at around two to three billion dollars which is far below the potential of both the Indian and Russian economies. We hope to raise the level of bilateral trade to billion by 2010,'' Dr Singh said.

He said something should be done quickly to ease business travel between the two countries, as the current visa procedures appeared to be an obstacle to developing business-to-business contacts between the two countries.

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