BENGALURU: The mayor of Menlo Park, a global technology and financial hub in the heart of U.S. Silicon Valley, Monday evening said her city will play a lead role in bringing U.S. companies to Kochi and developing infrastructure facilities in the city.
"Kochi is emerging as a global player in IT and startup culture. We are really impressed by the kind of ecosystem being created by the government. We will help the U.S. companies to establish their operations in the city and in turn also help the start-ups in Kochi to grow," said Catherine Carlton at the Infopark campus in Kochi.
She also added that up to 100 technology startups from Kerala could be given a chance to travel to the Silicon Valley to learn about the nuances of building a billion dollar tech company. Menlo Park in California is home to a number of technology giants including Facebook, and is known as the "capital for venture capital".
InfoPark CEO Hrishikesh Nair said that the tie-up with Menlo Park would further boost the growth of IT and start-ups in the state. The delegation is in Kochi ahead of the signing of the twin city agreement between Kochi and Menlo Park establishing social, cultural and economic tie-ups.
The signing will take place in the state capital on Wednesday in the presence of Chief Minister Oommen Chandy. It will be the first such agreement between an Indian city and Menlo Park. Among the key sticking points is a trade disagreement over India's domestic procurement requirements for solar cells and modules and their positions on intellectual property protection (IPP).
While "large, deep-pocketed American pharmaceutical companies with powerful lobbies in Washington want India to strengthen its regulatory regime," Foreign Policy said Indian generics manufacturers "fear that they will lose much of their business if India adopts U.S.-style patent protection."
The IPP issue resides at the heart of the proposed Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), a free trade agreement among 12 nations in the Asia Pacific accounting for 40 percent of world gross domestic product and one-third of world trade.
Both China and India are currently outside the TPP. Intellectual property regulations would be at the core of the TPP's potential negative impacts on India, Foreign Policy said.
"The TPP also includes a host of stringent labour and environment standards that India - and, for that matter, most emerging economies - would fail to meet," it said.
"There's no indication that the Modi government has any plans to cave on these standards, the adoption of which would seriously erode India's competitiveness, anymore than it has shown any inclination to cave on climate change - yet another area where India and the United States remain at logger heads," Foreign Policy said. "It's very hard to see how the new-found friendship between Obama and Modi can resolve these tensions," it said.
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