15th India-EU Summit to be held today

The 15th meeting of the India-European Union Summit will be held in virtual mode today. The Summit will be co-chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, President of European Council Charles Michel and President of European Commission Ursula von der Leyen.

 

The Summit will review India-EU cooperation covering political and security relations, trade and investment and economic cooperation. It is also expected to discuss developments around the COVID-19 pandemic and contemporary global matters of interest to both sides.

 

The Summit is taking place in the background of the EU wanting to play a more active role globally and also attaching higher priority to relationship with India and trying to look at the partnership in a more substantive way.

 

The new Presidents of the European Commission and European Council had taken over in December last year. The new leadership believes that the EU needs to play a stronger role in the global platform and has shown a lot of interest in India. It was in the year 2000 in which India and the European Union decided to institutionalise the mechanism at the level of the Summit.

 

This year marks 20 years of the Summit process between India and the EU. The last Summit between the two sides took place



in 2017.

 

Ahead of the India-EU summit, the European Union representative in India, Ambassador Ugo Astuto, in an exclusive interview to AIR News, said that India has an important role to play in the post-Covid world. Speaking about the 15th Indo-EU summit, the EU Ambassador emphasised that economic cooperation, climate change, multilateralism and post-Covid response are going to be the focus of today’s discussions.

 

Mr. Astuto said that both India and EU share strong bilateral relations and the summit holds high significance as both the partners will pledge to fight the menace of COVID-19 together. He said, both the partners share the same values of democracy and have converging interests that have become more relevant in the current scenario.

 

The Ambassador asserted that the summit will focus on a new cooperation agenda to create the future roadmap for a strong bilateral strategic partnership in the years ahead.

 

Mr. Astuto said, both India and European Union will discuss multiple issues in the virtual bilateral summit ranging from climate change to security and global peace. He expressed confidence in development of stronger Indo-EU partnership on multiple fronts.