British companies including BP and Vodafone invested $21.4 billion in India over the past decade, beating French and German companies put together. The investments include multi-billion dollar deals inked by oil and gas company BP with Reliance Industries and telecom operator Vodafone’s investments in India, the UK’s high commissioner to India, Dominic Asquith, told ET. He also cited examples of companies such as Rolls Royce and JCB that have invested in India for decades.
“There is a need for governmentto-government engagement on agreeing frameworks for new areas of collaboration as there are commonalities between UK’s industrial strategy and the Modi government’s priority areas,” Asquith said.
Modi travelled to the UK in April, his second visit to that country in three years, and met with British Prime Minister Theresa May.
Asquith said the UK and India were working together in the areas of cybersecurity, financial technology and data management and security as the exchange of goods, services and people between the two countries intensified. “We grant more business visas to Indian nationals than we do to nationals from the rest of the world put together,” Asquith said. The UK was introducing a new category of visas to facilitate the entry of ‘exceptional talent’ from India, he told ET.
The high commissioner said multiple partnerships were in the works between the two countries in areas of high-end technology such as the use of artificial intelligencebased applications to facilitate the setting up of over 5,000 medical diagnostic centres across India and enabling over 100,000 clinics to be connected through technology.
London’s prominence as a global financial hub had enabled Indian companies to raise money in that market, according to Asquith, who stated that 80% of masala bonds issued by Indian companies took place in London.
The high commissioner said his country was conscious about maintaining “levels of probity” for foreign fund flows into the UK. He stated that “due process” was being followed with respect to requests for extradition of Indian businessman such as Vijay Mallya who are currently residing in his country.
“The UK and India can collaborate to form the guiding principles that will determine future governance and ethics of the digital world,” Asquith said. He said collaborations in financial technology were under way and regulators such as the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority and Reserve Bank of India were in constant contact with each other. Research partnerships were also evolving, according to the high commissioner, who referred to cooperation between University of Oxford and Indian Institute of Science for high-class prosthetics and a study by the UK and dia for seismological research in J&K.
In“Tech hubs that we have agreed to form in Pune and Bengaluru will also become centres of such collaboration,” he said. (Economic Times)
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