Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Mauritian counterpart Pravind Kumar Jugnauth virtually inaugurated the social housing units project and participated in the foundation stone laying ceremony of a civil service college and a solar project being developed in Mauritius with India’s development support.

The projects are being implemented as part of the vibrant development partnership between India and Mauritius, per a release issues by the Ministry of External Affairs on Thursday.

“India and Mauritius are united by history, ancestry, culture, language and the shared waters of the Indian Ocean. Today, our robust development partnership has emerged as a key pillar of our close ties,” Modi said in his virtual address at the inauguration.

India and Mauritius’s cooperation during the Covid-19 pandemic has been exemplary, the PM said “Under our Vaccine Maitri programme, Mauritius was one of the first countries we were able to send COVID vaccines to. I am happy that today Mauritius is among the few countries in the world to have fully vaccinated three-fourths of its population,” he said.

Infra projects

The Social Housing Units project is one of the five high-profile infrastructure projects identified for implementation under the $353 million Special Economic Package (SEP) extended to Mauritius by India in 2016. The total cost of the project is $44.995 million including grant assistance of $20 million and Line of Credit support of $25 million.

The project comprises 956 housing units with associated infrastructure such as sewerage treatment plant, leeching field and playground. The housing units are of duplex type comprising four housing units with two families occupying the ground floor and two families occupying the first floor.

The 8 MW Solar PV Farm project, the foundation stone laying ceremony for which was witnessed by Modi and Jugnauth on Thursday, involves the installation of 25,000 PV cells to generate approximately 14 GWh of green energy annually, to electrify about 10,000 Mauritian households with an estimated avoidance of 13,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions every year, helping Mauritius mitigate the effects of climate change

The civil service college project, comprising an academic block of 3574 sq metre and an auditorium of 1120 sq metre, is expected to be completed in 18 months, by mid-2023.

The Mauritian PM thanked India for its wide ranging assistance and noted that under the leadership of Modi the relations between India and Mauritius had attained newer heights, the release said.

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