Hon’ble Shri Shashi Tharoor, Minister of State for External Affairs,
Shri Nalin Surie, Secretary (West), Ministry of External Affairs
Excellencies Ambassadors and High Commissioners of African countries in New Delhi,
Senior officials from the Government of India,
ladies and gentlemen.

I am delighted to be present here to inaugurate the India Africa Connect Website, launched by my Ministry.

Excellencies, the Website is yet another indication of our commitment to further strengthen the relationship with Africa. Africa has always had an important position in our foreign policy. Our linkages with Africa go back centuries. We had interacted closely with each other across the Indian Ocean. Later we shared similar experiences when we were both struggling against the forces of imperialism, colonialism, racial discrimination and apartheid.

Our cooperation as independent nations deepened and diversified during the second half of the 20th Century. This cooperation was based on a similarity of challenges, problems and experiences as developing countries involved in nation building, poverty alleviation, human resource development and development of production capacities and infrastructure, food security and health. During this process of cooperation, India was ever willing to share its capacities and experiences with its partners in Africa. These included cost-effective and appropriate technologies, democratic model of development, capacity building programmes, and use of the knowledge sector. Over the years, a major portion of our technical assistance and capacity building programmes were directed towards Africa. In recent years this has been supplemented by greater trade and economic linkages, developed by both our public and private sectors.

The India Africa Forum Summit of April’08 took our relationship to a new level. It created a new architecture for our partnership in the 21st century. The new roadmap set out in this Summit seeks to bring greater depth and substance to our engagement with Africa. Through this Summit, India renewed its commitment to cooperate with Africa in its economic development process and to peace and security in the continent.

Our relationship with Africa is diversified, encompassing a wide range of sectors including political, economic, cultural, social and technological. Apart from the Government-to-Government contacts, we are happy to see growing people-to-people exchanges. There is now a greater movement of people including students, entrepreneurs and tourists on both sides.

The India-Africa Connect website that I am inaugurating today will be yet another link between the two sides, and will strengthen the existing relationship. It will help bridge the information gap that still unfortunately exists between us. It is our hope that this Website will emerge as a key portal for news, views and features on India and Africa covering subjects and areas of interest to both our sides, including on science and technology, agriculture, education, health, energy, tourism, besides fashion and culture. A section has also been provided for each African country, and we expect that we will receive inputs from each country to regularly update those pages. This should be a process of continuous interaction.

I am particularly pleased that general interest and success stories on ‘Africa in India’ and ‘India in Africa’ would feature in the Website.

I would like the site to become a vibrant and interactive vehicle for reaching out to each other.

Excellencies, through you, I would also like to request your respective Governments to collaborate in this pioneering venture and to make India-Africa Connect a success.