India's national priorities are best served domestically

We should scale down expectations and time expended on preparing for the SCO and G20 summits

Multi-country meetings at the head of government-level are enjoyable extravaganzas and the media plays up such spectacles. Presidents and prime ministers are complicit in such self-promotion as their names and videos are splashed all over newspapers and television. The Indian government should review the opportunity cost of time spent in attending international meetings in-person at the level of ministers and prime ministers (PMs), particularly for those which are pro forma.

A beneficial time saving consequence of the Covid-19 pandemic was that during 2020 and 2021 many high-level government and corporate meetings took place virtually. In June-July 2022, Nato, EU and G7