Huge potential for trade between India, southern African countries: Prabhu

India is ready and willing to assist in the development of southern African countries, Union Minister Suresh Prabhu said at a business summit here, asserting that the region holds a "huge potential" for trade.

Commerce and Industry Minister Prabhu was leading a high level business delegation to Johannesburg to participate in the two-day India-South Africa Business Summit 2018 which began on April 29.

"We feel that there is a huge potential that exists between these two regions," Prabhu said as he shared the platform with his counterparts from Botswana, Swaziland, Lesotho and Mozambique at the summit.

He said a meeting in New Delhi just a month delibrated on what could be done in each of these countries.

"It was quite an eye-opener for us, because we realised that some of these countries have so much capability which we were not aware of, so we can actually use that and bring it into India as well. We are preparing for each and every country what it is that we can do together," the minister said.

"We don't want to offer one single solution to all the countries, but something befitting each of the countries in the southern African region," Prabhu said.

He said India's commitment to trade relations with Africa was "very strong" and efforts are on to find out how the credit extended for project financing in some of these countries can be further improved.

Prabhu said such steps would further benefit the countries where these projects are going to be implemented.

Despite the optimism about the pledge of support from India, Prabhu cautioned that these projects "should not be overambitious".

"Often the ideas don't work because of the very high ambitions that we start with, feeling that everything should be done immediately. That is not possible, even for India, which is a country much larger (than its African partners)."