India has been working on development partnerships with various countries

Post India-Africa summit, India committed lines of credit of US$6.5 billion, US$ 700 million of grants and over 50,000 scholarships to African students, Ministry of External Affairs Secretary(ER) Rahul Chhabra said on Wednesday.

India aims to continue its human-centric globalisation and welfare program with partnering countries, said the MEA while speaking at the curtain raiser of Diplomacy Unplugged, a dialogue series between India and partnering nations initiated by FICCI.

“We have been trying to finalise migration and mobility agreements with partnering countries. This pandemic threw up the issue of global shortage of trained manpower in various sectors that the MEA has taken note of,” the Secretary ER said.

“We have also started getting the states involved in our outreach in terms of promoting exports and incoming foreign business delegation. Not just in terms of cooperative federalism, we are also looking at competitive federalism,” he further added.

Speaking at the FICCI initiated programme, Italy’s ambassador to India Vincenzo de Luca said Italy and India are entering a new phase of relations after the successful virtual summit between the Prime Ministers of the two countries on November5, 2020.

“We were able to finalise a number of agreements not only on G2G, but also with the private sector. This only goes on to show how the two countries want to transform their partnership to ideally benefit from their economic, innovations and technological complementarity. The two countries also share a global agenda,” Ambassador de Luca added.

Further on the existing relations between both the countries, Ambassador de Luca said that the two countries signed many important agreements during the pandemic. “This was also the first time that a new five-year plan of action had been decided to deepen cooperation in the domain of culture, innovation and technology with the Indian government. The comprehensive partnership between India and Italy helps the companies to be more confident about investment in the two countries,” he added.

The Italian ambassador said both Rome and New Delhi are experiencing a momentum for a very important breakthrough relationship between them after a period of less intense dialogue. “Over the last three years we have increased the bilateral trade by 22 per cent. This is a remarkable progress, Ambassador Luca underlined.