Modi to meet with both dignitaries and titans of industry.
By Raif Karerat
Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India began a high-profile tour of the United States on Thursday in his latest effort to raise India’s profile on the global stage.
Modi, who arrived in New York Wednesday evening, has a double agenda for the five-day visit that will see him visit both the East and West Coasts — high-level diplomacy and promoting his “Make in India” and “Digital India” initiatives.
After an evening of informal meetings on Wednesday with community members from several places, including New York and Chicago metro areas and Georgia, Modi switches gears Thursday focusing on his economic agenda.
Outside of the U.N., external affairs ministry spokesman Vikas Swarup told reporters in New York Wednesday, “Startups, innovation and manufacturing are the thrust areas of this visit.”
His first meeting on Thursday is a roundtable with many leaders of the finance sector at Hotel Waldorf Astoria where he is staying.
According to NDTV, the speakers at the roundtable conference are:
- Jamie Dimon, chairman, CEO and president JP Morgan
- Steve Schwarzman, chairman, CEO and co-founder, Blackstone
- Charles Kaye, co-CEO, Warburg Pincus
- Henry Kravis, co-chairman and co-CEO, KKR
- Bill Ford, CEO, General Atlantic
- Peter Hancock, President and CEO, AIG Insurance
- Chase Coleman, co-founder, managing partner, Tiger Global
- Evan Greenberg, President and CEO, ACE Ltd
- Vicki Fuller, chief investment officer, NY State Common Retirement Fund
In the afternoon, he has a round table with media industry leaders that is hosted by Rupert Murdoch, the executive chairman of News Corp. and 21st Century Fox which owns Star TV. The theme of the meeting, which will include executives from other companies, is “Media, Technology and Communications — Growth Story for India.”
In the evening he is to meet Marillyn Hewson, the CEO of Lockheed Martin, the aerospace, defence and security company. India has bought giant C130 Super Hercules transport planes from Lockheed Martin.
That is to be followed by a meeting with Mike Burke, the CEO of AECOM, an infrastructure engineering and design company that works on an array of projects ranging from construction to transportation, and from environment to mining, oil and gas.
He is also slated to meet with Michael Bloomberg, who owns the news and financial information and media company that bear his name. Bloomberg, who is United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s Special Envoy for Cities and Climate Change, visited India earlier this year to promote sustainable development and international investments in the renewable energy sector.
Ajay Banga, chief executive of MasterCard, who is also the chairman of the U.S.-India Business Council, is scheduled to meet Modi as well.
Modi will end the day with a dinner with 47 CEOs of major Fortune 500 companies, mostly in manufacturing and infrastructure areas, Swarup said.
On Friday, he will address global heads of state at the Sustainable Development Summit hosted by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.
Friday will then see Modi has engage in bilateral meetings with King Abdullah II of Jordan, Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven, Bhutan Prime Minister Tshering Tobgay, , and Cyprus President Nicos Anastasiades.
Saturday will see Modi kick things off on the East Coast with a summit of the G-4, a grouping of India, Brazil, Germany and Japan that works for U.N. Security Council expansion and mutually supports one another for permanent seats. Mukerji said this is the first time in more than a decade the G-4 was meeting at the level of prime ministers and presidents.
India’s Permanent Reprasentative to the U.N., Asoke Kumar Mukerji, said they will discuss building on the recent U.N. General Assembly’s endorsement of Security Council reform and decide how best to proceed. The negotiations are scheduled to start in the first half of November.
In a letter to the U.N. Secretary General in July, Modi had said that that the UN must be made more effective for dealing with new security challenges as “we are now living in an era when non-state military actors are a major factor,” according to the Indian Express.
Modi will then immediately jet off to the West Coast, where he’ll visit Silicon Valley and meet with CEOs Tim Cook of Apple, Satya Nadela of Microsoft, Shantanu Narayen of Adobe, and Sundar Pichai of Google, executive chairmen Paul Jacobs of Qualcomm and John Chambers of Cisco, and Venkatesh Shukla, the president of The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE).
In California the prime minister will also visit Tesla Motors’ Elon Musk to learn about battery technology that could help harness solar energy on a more widespread scale, as well as attend a renewable energy talk at Stanford.
On the first trip by an Indian prime minister to Silicon Valley, Modi hopes to attract funds and skills from U.S. innovators to help India’s red-hot start-up scene grow, and he will seek to encourage some Indians who have thrived around San Jose to bring their knowledge back home, according to CNBC.
“He’ll be building a bridge,” said Rajat Tandon, who heads a program focused on startups at Indian IT group NASSCOM and was among the dozens of Indian entrepreneurs flying to California to join Modi this week.
Furthermore, in an attempt to recreate the fanfare of Modi’s Madison Square Garden reception last year, a massive Indian community meeting is planned at the SAP Center, a stadium in San Jose where 20,000 people are expected to attend, reported the Indo Asian News Service.
On Monday, Modi will return to New York, where he’ll engage in diplomacy talks with President Barack Obama, their third such set of meetings in the span of a year.
He also has bilateral meetings set with presidents Francois Hollande of France, Enrique Pena Nieto of Mexico, Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani of Qatar, and Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestine Authority.