EAM Jaishankar Highlights India’s New Momentum During Visit To Singapore

External Affairs Minister S.Jaishankar on Saturday asserted that India’s economy will grow
even bigger in the coming years and said that there is momentum in the country which
needs to be experienced to be believed.

Jaishankar made the remarks in Singapore as part of the three-nation visit. He was speaking on ‘Why Bharat Matters’. He stated that apart from an increase in ease of living and ease of doing business, India is ramping up its infrastructure through initiatives such as PM Gati Shakti.

‘It’s a nice way of saying that we will be more in your life than earlier, why would we be more in your life because we are going to have a much bigger economy…There’s today a momentum in India which has to be experienced to be believed. Today, it’s a country that builds eight new airports in a year, 28 km of highways every day and for the last 10 years, it has built 2 colleges a day.’

He also talked about India’s response to Covid-19 and New Delhi aiding multiple countries in
supplying vaccines. “We were very major producers of vaccines and as a minister, I was in the group of five ministers whom the PM Modi had tasked to deal with the COVID-19. One part of it was watching this pandemic come towards you, trying to prepare a country in terms of public health capabilities and other responses which were required at that time…However, once we started responding, other aspects of globalisation were also visible and that also told us why foreign policy mattered,” Jaishankar said.

Jaishankar also gave insights regarding globalization in relation to the pandemic. “On the one hand, the globalisation of the world was demonstrated by the nature in the manner in which the pandemic itself spread. So too was the fact that we were all so extraordinarily reliant for our daily necessities on one part of the global geography,” he said.

Jaishankar’s official itinerary includes visits to Singapore, the Philippines, and Malaysia from March 23 to March 27, 2024. The primary objective of the visit is to strengthen bilateral ties with these nations and to engage in discussions on mutual regional interests.