India Seeks To Bolster Trade Ties With Central Asia

New Delhi: Addressing the Business Council meeting in the national capital on Friday, External Affairs Minister Jaishankar highlighted the need to strengthen the economic partnership — deepen existing cooperation, diversify the trade basket and introduce sustainability and predictability in interactions.

“I would like our friends from central Asian economies to appreciate that an economy today which is in excess of $4 trillion, which is growing at 6-8 per cent annually, it will create new demands for products, for services and even I would say in a way new demands out of more prosperous lifestyles,” EAM Jaishankar emphasised. “That means more long-term contracts and arrangements, cross investments, joint ventures and certainly sectors like energy whether we are talking uranium, whether we are talking crude oil even potentially gas, whether we are looking at mining, If you are talking about coal or if you are discussing fertilizers, I think these are all relevant examples to reach really long term understatings between us,” the foreign minister highlighted.

India’s trade and economic ties with Central Asia over the last decade have shown a very strong positive trend. Mutual trade was less than $500 million a decade ago in 2014.