Top Indian CEOs including Tata Group’s Cyrus Mistry, Bharti Enterprises’ Sunil Bharti Mittal and HDFC’s Deepak Parekh — all part of the India-US CEO Forum — briefed Commerce & Industry Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on the discussions held with their US counterparts in various identified areas such as energy and manufacturing as a pre-cursor to the Strategic and Commercial Dialogue (S&CD) meeting on Tuesday.

“A lot of areas are specifically looked into for greater cooperation between India and the US on commercial matters. On all these there have been various groups chaired by Indian CEOs and their US counterparts. They have had discussions prior to the S&CD to begin tomorrow and wanted to brief me on it,” Sitharaman said talking to the media after the meeting on Monday. The discussions took place in varied areas such as the US participation in smart cities, the manufacturing of medical devices and the technology coming to India and setting up of civil nuclear power generating projects, she added. About 10 CEOs attended the meeting on Monday which also included Chanda Kochhar from ICICI Bank, and Anand Mahindra from Mahindra Group.

Led by Tata Group’s Cyrus Mistry and Honeywell’s Dave Cote, the India-US CEO Forum will have Commerce and Industry Minister Nirmala Sitharaman and US Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker presiding over the meeting.

The forum is likely to review the implementation status of recommendations made in its two meetings last year and would also make fresh suggestions to take forward the interests of businesses from both countries. The two sides had agreed on specific areas to facilitate economic development initiatives, which include infrastructure collaboration and smart cities, ease of doing business, innovation and entrepreneurship and standards.

Related Topics
comment COMMENT NOW