UK PM sets the agenda at HUL campus meet

He was precise to a tee. Even his town-hall address to employees of Hindustan Unilever (HUL) — his first engagement during his three-day visit to India — was kept under 40 minutes on a sunny Monday morning. At 46, David William Donald Cameron, the youngest prime minister of the United Kingdom in 200 years, knows time is of essence. The alumnus of the Oxford and Eton said he had come to forge a special relationship with India — a country with which Britain already does significant amount of business.

“Britain is the biggest investor in India and you put half of your investment in Europe in our country,” he said. “Besides, you have the largest democracy, we have the oldest democracy. Your society is diverse and so is ours. This ties us together in more ways than one,” he said to loud applause from the almost 200-strong gathering of HUL employees, some of whom were seated across him in a circle in the centre of the building and some of whom were looking down from their first and second floor work stations.

That he chose the London and Rotterdam-based company’s Indian office to kick off his second visit to the country in two-and-a-half years did not go unnoticed by its employees. Halfway into his town-hall address at the suburban office of the company, which was sanitised and audited by the city police, Cameron was confronted with the inevitable: Why come here when you could have started your Mumbai leg by dropping in at any of the offices of some of the British giants in the city?

Cameron, accompanied by a 100-strong business delegation, the largest so far to come with a British PM, had a ready answer, “It is great to be visiting Unilever’s Indian headquarters on Monday. Unilever is a shining example of how a business with British roots can succeed in India and beyond and I’m delighted to hear they’re expanding further — investing over ^40 million in a new manufacturing plant in the country to service the emerging Indian and South Asian markets.”

According to him, India is going to be “one of the leading nations this century”.