Cameron hoping to forge new special relationship with visit to India
Cameron hoping to forge new special relationship with visit to India
When David Cameron stands on the grounds of India's best-known IT company on and makes his pitch for building a "new special relationship" between Britain and India, he will little question recollect the thoughts of a previous visitor to the Infosys campus.
It had been once visiting the Bangalore headquarters of the IT pioneer that the Pulitzer-winning author, Thomas Friedman, came up with both the concept and the title of his book, The World is Flat. The concept contained at intervals his treatise on the globalised economy was that within the interconnected business world of the 21st century, all players were equal. India, in particular, had heaps to offer.
As he launches the Government's flagship foreign policy initiative, the Prime Minister will hope to develop a additional fruitful relationship with a nation that has an economy growing at almost 10 per cent a year and that offers huge potential for trade and investment.
For Mr Cameron, it is personal plus business. The modification in foreign policy is very abundant his pet project, not something cooked up by mandarins. He was converted throughout a visit to India in 2006, his 1st overseas trip as Leader of the Opposition. He believes ?C and some politically neutral British officials agree ?C that the previous Labour Government put too several eggs in China's basket and got little in return, whereas paying lip service to the planet's largest democracy, India.
Mr Cameron can take personal charge of Britain's relations with India, leaving Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister, to develop links with China. Wanting east is additionally a deliberate shift from what Mr Cameron sees as Labour's obsession with the "special relationship" with the United States. The US is forging new links with the world's quick-growing economies, so Britain must do therefore too, Mr Cameron believes.
India could be a logical partnership: it shares a 250-year history with the UK, contains a large English-speaking population and already has close ties as a results of emigration and academic placements.
Mr Cameron is taking an unusually high-powered delegation including six cabinet ministers and concerning 60 businessmen. He can be in the middle of William Hague, the Foreign Secretary; George Osborne, the Chancellor; Vince Cable, the Business Secretary; Jeremy Hunt, the Culture Secretary; David Willetts, the Higher Education Minister and Greg Barker, the Climate Modification Minister.
Many business deals are probably to be announced throughout the visit ?C as well as a ?500m order for Hawk jets from BAE Systems. Richard Olver, the chairman of BAE, can be within the delegation, that will also include Richard Lambert, director general of the CBI; Sir Martin Sorrell of WPP; John Varley of Barclays Bank; Gerry Grimstone of Customary Life; Peter Sands of Customary Chartered; Sir Anthony Bamford of JCB; Sir John Banham of Johnson Matthey and Vittorio Colao of Vodafone. Britain needs India to open its doors to banks, legal and insurance companies and tiny makers; in come back, India can raise for mutual recognition of qualifications thus that its lawyers and bankers will operate within the UK. Privately, British firms complain concerning Indian paperwork and even alleged corruption, although Mr Cameron isn't going to shout about that. A business taskforce is possible to be founded to ensure the high-profile visit is not a 1-off, quickly forgotten mission. The aim can be to break down barriers to trade.
The foremost attractive prize in a country with a growing consumer class is that the retail market. At the moment, this sector in India is worth around ?227bn and is forecast to grow to ?352bn by 2014. Yet a full ninety per cent of that trade is unorganised and the potential opportunities for corporations like Tesco and alternative retail giants are vast.
Mr Cameron will hold talks with Manmohan Singh, the Indian Prime Minister, and also the Indians will lay on a banquet for him at Hyderabad House, the splendidly ornate Lutyens-engineered palace within the centre of Delhi that was once the residence of the last Nizam of Hyderabad. Mr Cameron can be trying to increase Indian investment in the UK, seeking to draw in more Indian students to British universities and to halt the slide of British influence in India.
Six decades when India won independence from Britain, the two countries already do masses of business. In keeping with official figures, in 2009 total bilateral trade was price ?11.5bn, with UK exports to India totalling ?4.7bn and ?6.8bn of Indian exports to Britain.
India is that the fourth-largest single investor in Britain, whereas British investment in India lags behind Singapore and therefore the US. There are 40,000 Indian students within the UK. The Government, beneath hearth from Labour for having a cuts agenda but no growth strategy, needs to secure as much business as attainable from India.
However the historic links bring problems also opportunities, UK officials admit. Previous British politicians have been accused of patronising their hosts, and in nowadays's world the UK arguably wants India additional than India needs it. And India is gravitating towards the US. Trade between India and the US, at ?36bn, is three times the amount with Britain and there are more than twice as many Indian students in America than within the UK.
America welcomes India's entrepreneurs with offers of residency rights for making jobs, whereas in London the Government is imposing a cap on immigration from outside the EU. "There is a contradictory message to some extent," said Jo Johnson, the Tory MP for Orpington, brother of London mayor Boris Johnson and formerly the Monetary Times bureau chief in Delhi, who will accompany Mr Cameron. "The massive drawback in the [UK-India] bilateral relationship has been a tendency to assume, okay, we tend to do the big high-profile visit, we tend to announce some additional or less incredible trade targets, we tend to all go home and there is no follow through."
Gerwyn Davies, public policy adviser at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, warned that the immigration ceiling would hit Commonwealth countries like India. "Now is not the most effective time to impose a cap, as a result of we want those workers to consolidate and strengthen what's already a fragile economic recovery," he said.
What will Britain supply India? There can be closer links between universities, sports and cultural bodies within the two countries, and an provide of help on security for the Commonwealth Games, which take place in Delhi in October.
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