Mukherjee, Geithner aim for complementary growth of India

Washington, June 28: As Defence Minister, he inked a game-changing defence pact with the US, as Foreign Minister, he signed the historic India-US civil nuclear deal and now as Finance Minister, Pranab Mukherjee is all set to put India and the US on the path of a "strategic economic" relationship.

This strategic economic relationship would not be of competition, unlike that with other countries, but would be complementing the growth and development of each other, officials familiar with the talks between the two largest democratic countries of the world said.

Pranab Mukherjee, who arrived here on Monday to attend the second annual meeting of the India-US Economic and Financial Partnership, is all set to lay the groundwork for a new era of trade and economic partnership with the United States, officials said.

Though no formal agreements or memorandum of understandings are to scheduled to be signed during the day-long talks, officials asserted that the indications so far are that the talks could result in a path-breaking economic relationship between the two countries, following in the footsteps of what Mukherjee did to the India-US relationship when he was the country's Defence Minister and then the External Affairs Minister.

This is the first time that an Indian Finance Minister is travelling to the United States with half a dozen top officials -- Governor of the Reserve Bank of India D Subbarao, Secretary of Economic Affairs R Gopalan, Secretary of Financial Services Shashikant Sharma, Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Board of India U K Sinha; Chairman of the Forward Market Commission B C Khatua and Chief Economic Advisor Kaushik Basu.

PTI