PM Modi-Obama meet to focus on economic expansion

Elaborating on the agendas that Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the US President Barack Obama will take up during their meeting, Indian Ambassador to the US Arun Singh has said both the leaders will discuss the whole range of bilateral, regional and global issues and economic engagement will certainly be a part of what they would discuss.

Singh said, "India and US have just completed the strategic and economic dialogue and the idea is while we have expanded in a significant way our political, security and defence cooperation, we need to make enhanced effort in terms of expanding economic engagement between the two countries."

He said when President Obama had visited India in January, the two leaders had declared a goal of taking our trade relationship to a level of 500 billion dollars from the present level of 120 billion dollars.

"It will be important to see what kind of new opportunity we can create in the economic sector and that is why, an important part of the Prime Minister's engagement during his visit to the US is certainly focusing on the economic. There is a discussion focusing on the financial sector in terms of economic engagement in India," he said, adding there would also be focus on manufacturing and infrastructure and about 40 CEOs from these sectors would be present in the evening meeting tomorrow.

During his visit to California, one of the important engagements would be at Tesla for battery technology, said Singh, adding that it has implications in terms of storage of renewal energy.

In addition, there would also be focus on digital economy and digital technology and there is tremendous interest in people and companies there in partnering with India, he said.

Underlining the significance of the PM's California visit, Singh said, "The role and participation of Indian-origin tech entrepreneurs in that area is extremely significant in terms of main stream cutting-age technologies and effort going on there and today, more that 15 per cent start ups in Silicon valley are attributed to Indian-origin tech entrepreneurs.