PM to address India-UK Investment Summit

London, Oct 10: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his British counterpart Tony Blair will address the India-United Kingdom Investment Summit here today.

The summit aims to strengthen symbiotic business linkages, create synergy and enhance the still untapped potential of the economic relationship between the two countries.

Commerce Minister Kamal Nath has already held preliminary discussions with British industrialists.

Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) President R Seshasayee and Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) President Saroj Kumar Poddar are leading a 70-member joint delegation from India for the Summit.

CII Vice-President Sunil Bharti Mittal, FICCI Vice-President N Srinivasan, CII Director General Lt Gen S S Mehta and FICCI Secretary General Amit Mitra are also part of the joint delegation.

The event will be chaired by Lord Bilimoria of Chelsea, co-chairperson of the Indo-British Partnership(IBP).

Being jointly organised by the industry bodies CII and FICCI, and UK Trade and Investment (UKTI), under the India-British Partnership, the summit will have interactive sessions on bilateral investments and discuss what the two countries can do to attract investments from each other.

There will also be specific deliberations on SMEs and manufacturing during the summit. An add-on feature will be the CEOs dialogues on energy, infrastructure, financial services, ICT, life sciences and health care.

UK-India bilateral trade in goods and services is at 6.3 billion pounds in 2004 and touched 7.2 billion pounds in 2005. As a proportion of total UK-World goods trade, both UK exports to and imports from India increased between 1992 and 2005 from 0.9 per cent to 1.3 per cent for exports, and from 0.7 per cent to one percentage point for imports..

Indian companies nearly doubled their investments in Britain during 2005-06 to emerge as the third largest overseas investor in the UK. According to the UK Inward Investment Report 2006, Indian companies invested 1.02 billion pounds in 76 investment projects during the year.

Some of the major items of bilateral trade in goods include non-metallic minerals, gold, power generating and telecom equipment, industrial machinery, textiles, readymade garments, gems and jewellery, footwear and metal manufactures.

UNI

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