Pranab promises India's contribution to South-South experience exchange facility

Istanbul, Oct 5 (ANI): Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee has announced that India would be an active partner in South-South experience exchange facility and would soon be making a contribution to this facility.

He was speaking at a function on Innovative Development: South-South Opportunity here late last night.

Mukherjee expressed the hope that donor countries can continue to support this facility and the important South-South development agenda.

Stating that it is a creative and important initiative, he expressed his happiness that the World Bank has taken it on.

He encouraged the developing country partners to take advantage of this facility and learn from each other.

"The South-South learning is indeed a new opportunity in development. Many developing countries may not have enough financial resources, but many have very rich development knowledge," he added.

The Minister said that India's experience in poverty alleviation, education, cooperatives, women's thrift and credit groups and large scale wage employment programmes like the National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme could provide valuable lessons to other developing countries, especially African countries.

"The Indian experience in implementing economic reforms, in the development of IT sector, building of infrastructure through the PPP model, setting up of centers of excellence in engineering and management education, could help other developing countries to face and overcome similar developmental challenges," he said.

"On other hand, we would be keen to know how conditional cash transfer programmes have worked successfully to ensure targeted subsidy provision to the poor in many countries, or how some countries have mainstreamed environmental concerns in their national development plans", the Minister added. (ANI)