Arab League chief to push for more cooperation in India

17122013

The chief of Arab League Nabil el-Araby will arrive in India on Tuesday where he will meet top leaders and will sign a Memorandum of Cooperation to deepen economic and cultural relationship between the two.

Araby will meet External Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid and Vice President Hamid Ansari during his visit.  This will be Araby’s first visit to India since assuming the post of Secretary General of the Arab League. Araby, former Foreign Minister of Egypt, was the Egyptian Ambassador to India in the early 1980s.  The new MOC and Executive Programme (EP) will represent a significant upgrade in the relationship between India and the Arab League. Under the proposed EP, there will be an annual senior officials meeting in which senior diplomats from the 22 Arab members states will meet with their counterparts from India and every two years.  A Ministerial meeting between the Arab League and India will also be held under the new programme. It also proposes an Arab-India Partnership Summit in the field of trade and investment, an Indo-Arab Cultural Festival, cooperation in the energy sector, agriculture, education and human resources, as well as the media.  A conference of the Presidents of prominent Indian universities with their counterparts in the Arab world is also being planned in Kuwait in 2014. The Arab world is one of the largest partner of India with over USD 110 billion in trade