India's trade and business with Africa booms
Thursday, 14 April 2011, 00:46 IST
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Abuja: India's trade with Africa totalled $45 billion last year in addition to a number of investments across the continent that are worth more than $45 billion, a senior Indian official said in this Nigerian capital. A total of $2.3 billion out of the $5.4 billion credit earmarked for Africa this year under a five-year programme has been made available as part of India's efforts to cooperate more with Africa. "The credit is meant to address the challenges of infrastructure, capacity building, and human resources issues," Vishnu Prakash, spokesperson of India's external affairs ministry, told newspersons here during a visit with Indian journalists. He said the upcoming India-Africa Summit in Addis Ababa next month was part of the effort to increase collaboration with the continent. Prakash said Africa now had a growing partnership with India, a relationship that started long back, but improved over the past few years. "With the involvement of Indian business giants such as Tatas, Mahindras, Kirloskars, Ranbaxy, RITES, IRCON, NSIC, TCS, OVL and others, our bilateral ties have improved a lot, making us the second largest trading partner with the continent," he added. Nigeria, which had become India's largest trading partner, had more potential to attract investment, he said. "For India, energy security is a very important consideration and we import almost 80 percent of our energy from the global market. In Africa, Nigeria and Sudan are two key countries from which we import significant amount of petroleum products," Prakash added. He said there were several areas that India and Nigeria could work on together to enhance trade. "Pharmaceuticals are one of them because we are global leaders in production drugs which are high quality and of cheap price, and I know that Indian drugs are in high demand in Nigeria." Prakash said there were other areas such automobile centres, equipment and machinery, textiles as well as the services sector of information and communication technology that Nigeria and India could collaborate on for the benefit of their people. He said Nigeria figured prominently on the business ladder of Indian companies in terms of investments and trade and was optimistic that there were more opportunities to be explored.
Source: IANS
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