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Ranabir Ray Choudhury

May look at investment opportunities in AP, TN

There is substantial room for growth in India-Netherlands economic relations, said Ms Karien van Gennip, the Dutch Minister for Foreign Trade, in an interview given to Indian journalists at Amsterdam recently. Ms Gennip will be visiting New Delhi, Hyderabad and Chennai in the first week of September and will be leading a large delegation of Dutch businessmen.

Learning experience

She said among other things her trip would be more of a learning experience, especially regarding the methods by which India had developed so very rapidly in the economic sphere in recent years. She noted that while interest in technology in the Netherlands had dipped since the nineties, it had increased in India. One of her goals during her forthcoming visit would be to find out how and why this had happened and "how can we in the Netherlands also be able to create a society that is in love with technology and innovation."

She said India had developed a cutting edge in technology and she wanted to see how this capability had been acquired.

She said a lot was being done by the Dutch Government as well as by major corporations such as Philips to fuel interest in innovation but "some way or the other, Dutch society at large is not hungry for technology as India is." As she put it, "stardom" in the Netherlands was to engage in the arts, the professions, business entrepreneurship and the like, with a little bit of interest also in the gaming industry.

Sectors in focus

Asked what specific sectors she would focus on during the visit, she said apart from her own general interest in learning about Indian expertise in technology, there already were a number of areas in which Dutch companies excelled such as water management. Ms Gennip said as the Netherlands was two to three metres under sea level, the Dutch had "developed a policy on living with water instead of fighting it, which had been very successful in the past decades."

Alternative energy

Another area of interest would be the development of alternative energy sources like solar, water and wind, not to speak of nuclear energy. Energy from municipal waste was also important, she said, adding that the city of Amsterdam was having such a project which was in its "testing phase", the results of which were "promising". The Dutch were trying to be "creative and innovative" on the subject, she said.

Port development was another area of interest for the visit, especially in view of the experience which the Dutch have accumulated vis-a-vis the port of Rotterdam, which is the largest in Europe and the third largest in the world after Shanghai and Singapore. Ms Gennip said while Rotterdam had a relatively small area, it had "very high quality and standards in the handling of cargo". The design and management of ports was one of the aspects of Dutch economic experience, which she wanted to get across to India during her visit, the Minister added.

Agro-business

This apart agro-business was another area which would figure in discussions with the Netherlands being the world's second or third largest exporter of farm products (depending on the position of France, the US occupying the top slot). She said the focus during the visit would not merely be on the product aspect but also on the knowledge dimension of the sector, specifically the phenomenon of how such a small country like the Netherlands could set such high quality standards and be able to produce so much in terms of volume.

During the visit, Ms Gennip would be exploring the issue of agri-business exports from the Netherlands to India as also the IT exchange information between the two countries, which was being facilitated by the respective Governments.

The Minister said she would be talking to the Governments of the States she would be visiting about the "investment climate" and the "opportunities for both the countries to build relations and exchange ideas." She emphasised that this would be "a very important part" of the effort to "bring our business together and our knowledge."

Issue of Visas

Speaking on the visa issue, Ms Gennip said her country was aware of the "challenges" in the existing system and was doing everything possible to overcome them. In fact, a lot had already been done to make the ingress of knowledge workers from smaller companies in particular easier into the Netherlands (new regulations had been put into place a year and a half ago). In recent months, an effort has been made to inject more uniformity in the visa process employed by each Dutch city which, unlike in India, have an important role to play in the setting of the overall national visa policy for foreigners.

As far as tourist visas are concerned, the Minister said they were governed by overall EU policy (the Schengen countries) and were less of a problem than knowledge visas. However, she gave the assurance that if there were hurdles in the way of Indian tourists going to the Netherlands (particularly when the number of Indian tourists was rising sharply), "we need to solve it."

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