Saturday, November 26, 2011
U.S. official pursuing India education mission
From The Hindu
Ann Stock, the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State, will travel to India November 26-December 2, 2011 to follow up on the U.S.-India Higher Education Summit, the U.S. Department of State announced.
Her engagements in India come in the wake of the October Summit, for which Indian Minister for Human Resources Development Kapil Sibal visited Washington.
Per a statement by the State Department Ms. Stock will visit New Delhi, Chandigarh and Chennai, where she will meet with government officials, students, and members of civil society.
At the culmination of the Higher Education Summit there were no ‘big bang’ announcements in terms of new agreements penned but at the time Mr. Sibal expressed confidence that it had set in motion the mechanisms for future exchanges that could lead to more U.S. investment into the vast vocational education space in India.
Ann Stock, the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State, will travel to India November 26-December 2, 2011 to follow up on the U.S.-India Higher Education Summit, the U.S. Department of State announced.
Her engagements in India come in the wake of the October Summit, for which Indian Minister for Human Resources Development Kapil Sibal visited Washington.
Per a statement by the State Department Ms. Stock will visit New Delhi, Chandigarh and Chennai, where she will meet with government officials, students, and members of civil society.
At the culmination of the Higher Education Summit there were no ‘big bang’ announcements in terms of new agreements penned but at the time Mr. Sibal expressed confidence that it had set in motion the mechanisms for future exchanges that could lead to more U.S. investment into the vast vocational education space in India.
Labels: Ann Stock, India visit, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State, U.S.-India Higher Education Summit
Saturday, November 05, 2011
U.S. NSA heading to India
From The Hindu
Thomas Donilon, United States National Security Advisor, will be making a trip to India later this month, where he will meet with his Indian counterpart Shiv Shankar Menon and other leaders, the State Department announced.
Following a stop in Beijing Mr. Donilon’s visit to New Delhi is aimed at reviewing recent developments in the U.S.-India strategic partnership, and discussing ways to advance key elements of the relationship, the State Department said, emphasising in particular both countries’ participation in the upcoming East Asia Summit.
“Mr. Donilon’s visit underscores this Administration’s commitment to growing U.S. leadership in Asia, and our work with emerging powers, such as China and India, as a core component of this commitment,” according to an official statement here.
Labels: India visit, Indo-U.S. relations, Thomas Donilon, U.S. NSA
Thursday, January 20, 2011
Hillary to visit India in spring
From The Hindu
United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and a host of other senior cabinet officials will be visiting India during the spring season this year, according to Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs, Robert Blake.
Speaking at Rice University in Houston, Texas, Mr. Blake said that a series of high-profile visits led by the Secretary would take forward the U.S.-India Strategic Dialogue process, “which oversees the entire spectrum of our cooperation.”
In a speech about the Obama administration’s priorities in South and Central Asia that emphasised the relevance of India to U.S. strategic calculations, Mr. Blake also corroborated the recent announcement by the U.S. Commerce Secretary, Gary Locke, that his department would be leading a trade delegation to India in February.
Mr. Blake noted that while in India Mr. Locke’s team would attend Aero India, a biannual Indian aerial fair, and also underscored the U.S. anticipation of India soon announcing the winners of a tender “worth up to $12 billion to supply 126 medium multi-range combat aircraft – a competition in which both Boeing and Lockheed Martin have entered their jets.”
The Assistant Secretary further elaborated on the bilateral trade and defence deals inked between India and the U.S. following President Barack Obama’s visit in November, pointing out that they amounted to over $14.9 billion, with $9.5 billion in U.S. export content that supported the creation of 50,000 American jobs.
Apart from the boost in bilateral economic cooperation that the President’s visit had engendered, Mr. Blake emphasised that India, which he described as South Asia’s “thriving anchor,” continued to play a key role in development efforts in Afghanistan. He said, “As a sign of our close partnership in the region, the President announced ... that we would work with India on women’s empowerment and capacity building in Afghanistan.”
He noted that such projects with India in Afghanistan marked “a small but important part of a significant new global development – the emergence of a global strategic partnership between India and the U.S.”
Touching upon energy issues Mr. Blake said that the U.S. had “welcomed renewed interest in [the] TAPI [gas pipeline project], although the challenges to completing such a project are numerous and real.” He noted that the TAPI project would require a multi-billion dollar investment to build a pipeline that would cross “volatile areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan as well as the tense border between Pakistan and India.”
Labels: Hillary Clinton, India visit
Saturday, April 03, 2010
Geithner spells out India visit prospects
From The Hindu
“I think it’s interesting that India has been remarkably effective at extending the reach of the financial sector to people living outside the formal economy,” U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner said, on the eve of a key visit to India.
Touching on some of the lessons that he hoped he could bring back from India to the United States, he said that close to 40 million Americans do not have bank accounts and “it would be nice for us… to understand how they’ve been so effective, starting from a much lower base, at substantially increasing access to the banking sector.”
Mr. Geithner’s comments came at a select press gathering at the Treasury this week, ahead of his departure. He will be in India on April 6-7. In New Delhi he will launch the U.S.-India Economic and Financial Partnership with Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee. In Mumbai he will meet with Indian and American business leaders.
The newly-formed Partnership aims to strengthen bilateral engagement and understanding on macroeconomic, financial sector and infrastructure-related issues, a statement from the Treasury said. After the Partnership’s Cabinet-level meetings between Mr. Geithner and Mr. Mukherjee, Working Groups will meet through the year to advance discussions on specific economic areas.
Mr. Geithner touched on a range of issues relevant to his upcoming interactions in India. Besides the basic agenda for financial reform and cooperation to be discussed in India, he commented on President Obama’s plan to aim for tax neutrality but not for penalising outsourcing companies, India and multilaterals such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the question of deepening capital markets access, curtailing the financing of terrorism, and confidence in the dollar as a reserve currency.
Taxing outsourcers
On India’s concern’s over the U.S. administration’s moves towards raising taxes on companies engaged in outsourcing operations overseas, Mr. Geithner said: “What we have in the U.S. is a tax code where if you have two companies operating the same business in the same State, [the] same part of the country, and one decides it is going to build its next plant outside the U.S. and another decides it is going to build its next plant in that State — the first one, the one that puts its plant outside has a substantially lower tax treatment on its local income.”
On this basis, Mr. Geithner argued, the incentives were “not neutral to the location of the investment. “We’re just trying to get reform that achieves neutrality; it is pretty good policy to be neutral on these kinds of things.”
Multilateral engagement
To a question on the U.S. view on India’s pitch for more rights at the IMF, the Secretary responded: “As part of the reforms we agreed to in the G20 process in London, we initiated and committed to support a substantial rebalancing of the basic voting rights in the institutions, not just in the IMF but in the multilateral development banks.”
The U.S. was negotiating a series of agreements across those institutions and that might come to closure later this year, he added, confirming that such reform that could affect India’s role was “absolutely” on the table and moving forward.
As an example, he said, the U.S. had reached a conditional agreement around the Inter-American Development Bank and IDB reform agenda where voting shares were not central to it but there was a parallel process similar to the World Bank and the IMF.
The issues under consideration at the multilateral institutions are three, Mr. Geithner said: the financial structure of the institution; the governance structure of the institutions and the broad programme priorities, instruments; and the question of what the focus of these institutions should be.
Financial regulation
Among the issues that the Secretary will discuss in India a few stand out. These include deepening capital markets access by foreign entities and measures to curb terrorism financing – an issue that Mr. Geithner confirmed he would take up with Indian officials.
On the issue of capital markets access, Mr. Geithner denied that there was any tension between India and the U.S. given that India might desire to keep its financial system protected from some types of capital market flows. He said that political leaders in India recognised that “they are not at the end of the process of reform in the financial sector; and there is a range of things that will be in India's interest to manage through going forward.”
Mr. Geithner responded to questions on overly restrictive export controls, saying, “We have in the U.S. an export control regime designed in a different period, different time strategically and the President has done the consequential thing of setting in process a broader review [and] reform plan to update and modernise that regime.”
Strength of the dollar
On the dollar’s role in the financial system over time, Mr. Geithner said: “The future is going to depend primarily on how well the U.S. manages our economic challenges and I think that it is very encouraging and good and reassuring for the system as a whole and the U.S. in this financial crisis, [that] at times where there was the greatest concern about the basic stability of the financial system, about the risk of a great depression, deflation, in that period of time people generally still sought the safety of U.S. financial assets…”
Nevertheless, he said: “We’re going to make sure that we are working very hard to demonstrate that we are going to manage are economic challenges as carefully and wisely as we can.”
Childhood memories
The Secretary expressed some fond memories he had of his early years in India, where he lived during 1968-1973, when his father was the Deputy Resident Representative for the Ford foundation in New Delhi.
“I went to the American International School; I lived in Friends’ Colony,” he recalled. He valued being exposed to India at an early age “to learn to see as much as [possible] of Indian lives, not just extreme poverty but… a country with India's great opened dynamism tradition.”
Labels: India visit, Pranab Mukherjee, Timothy Geithner, U.S. Treasury Secretary, U.S.-India Economic and Financial Partnership
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