London, February 05: India and the UK have agreed on the text of a landmark civil nuclear deal and a formal pact may be signed within a week, Britain’s Business Secretary Lord Peter Mandelson announced.
“The civil nuclear deal text has been agreed to and it will be signed soon, may be within a week after ministerial approvals,” Lord Mandelson told a joint press conference with Commerce Minister Anand Sharma after the hour-long meeting of the Joint Economic and Trade Committee at the Lancaster House.
He said the two sides have also agreed to open up a number of professional services like legal, accountancy and banking between the two countries.
“We have made great progress in a number of professional services areas – lawyers, accountancy and banking. All these indicate reasonable progress.
“We have been able to open up the professional and business services area between us and we hope to do more work for greater collaboration in the areas of manufacturing, particularly high end of manufacturing – high technology, high value added activity,” Mandelson said.
Lord Mandelson said “we have identified one or two areas where great collaboration can take place and defence is one such areas.
“India wants collaboration in defence manufacture and supply and we have our own units who are keen to collaborate with India particularly in R and D. This is an area where business-to-business collaboration between the two countries can take place.”
Concurring with Lord Mandelson, Sharma said “we had very productive discussion at the JETCO (Joint Economic and Trade Committee) meeting, reviewed functioning of various groups and explored enhanced bilateral cooperation.”
India and the UK has strategic relationship in a range of areas from science to defence, agriculture and security- related issues, he said.
“We have focused on manufacturing and innovation and a number of other areas. Britain has Hi-Tech, and India is ready to absorb it – particularly training across the industry for skills to meet global shortage.
“We have also looked at agriculture, professional services working group and reviewed their progress. We also discussed cooperation in energy sector, investment in infrastructure, professional services and telecommunication,” Sharma said.
“Joint ventures in Indian Infrastructure was another key area where in the next one and a half decades the investment would be to the tune of 1.5 trillion dollars. The civilian nuclear cooperation agreement will be signed soon,” he said. Lord Mandelson said that in the field of defence collaboration, India would like to have armed vehicles for the military.
There are so many different possibilities in the field of defence as India wants to achieve self-sufficiency in defence, he said.
-PTI