Here are excerpts from Secretary of State John Kerry’s speech at the Vibrant Gujarat Trade Summit in Gandhinagar, India on the weekend. He also met with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, see photo below.
” .. Our (USA-India) economic partnership is already growing stronger by the day. Annual trade in goods and services between the United States and India has grown nearly five-fold since 2000 alone. Bilateral foreign direct investment now stands at nearly $30 billion. And our trade and investment supports hundreds of thousands of jobs in both of our countries and in other countries that are partnering here. The fruits of this kind of partnership are extraordinary, and the supply chain for goods and services now stretches not just one country to another but between many different countries.
“We share Prime Minister Modi’s goal of increasing our countries’ annual trade fivefold in the years ahead, and we want to expand our commercial ties and change the way our businesses talk with one another so we can take this relationship, and these relationships is plural, to the new heights that we envision.”
“The world that changed the United States creation of wealth in the 1990s was a $1 trillion market with 1 billion users. And we created wealth through every single sector of the American economy. It was the technology revolution – communications, principally. The world we’re looking at today, the energy market, is a $6 trillion market with four to five billion users today, potentially, and up to 9 billion users by the year 2050, if population meets the current trends. My friends, that’s the greatest market human beings have ever known. And if we seize it properly, our ability to bring modern resources to the task is unlimited.
“That means we need to join together to take advantage of the challenge that was laid down by Prime Minister Modi who has now committed to greatly expand India’s wind resources, make your agricultural systems more resilient, increase your national solar mission fivefold. And together, we can create an environment where all of our companies play leading roles in bringing cutting-edge technologies, equipment, capital, and know-how not just to India but to countless countries that need this growth and development now. That’s how we will turn Prime Minister Modi’s “Make in India” initiative a win-win opportunity for the planet as a whole.”
