He also reviewed India’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic (File)
Singapore:
External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said on Saturday that India’s current momentum has to be experienced first-hand to believe that the country will emerge as a bigger economy in the coming years.
Jaishankar, who arrived in Singapore earlier today as part of his three-nation visit, said apart from improving the ease of living and doing business, India is also strengthening infrastructure through initiatives such as Prime Minister Gati Shakti.
“It’s a nice way of saying we are going to be more integrated into your lives than before and why we are going to be more integrated into your lives is because we are going to have a bigger economy… India today has a The momentum that must be experienced is incredible. Today, the country is building 8 new airports every year, 28 kilometers of highways every day, and for the past 10 years, 2 universities every day,” said Jaishankar in his speech at the Indian Institute of Technology said. South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore. He was talking about “Why Bharat Matters”.
He also reviewed India’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the country’s outreach to other countries through vaccines.
“We are a major manufacturer of vaccines and as a minister, I am one of the five ministers assigned by Prime Minister Modi to deal with COVID-19. Part of that is watching this pandemic come at you and trying to do Be prepared with a country’s public health capabilities and other responses needed at the time… But once we start responding, other aspects of globalization are also evident, which also tells us why foreign policy matters,” Mr. Jaishankar explain.
Reflecting on the collective experience of the international community, Jaishankar said that the main collective experience recently has been COVID-19.
“The world’s communities, the world’s challenges, especially in the last five years and definitely in the last ten years, I think each of us has experienced this very vividly in our own lives. The dominant collective experience, certainly , for all of us, COVID-19 is it…
“When I think about this, my mind goes back to early January 2020, when we first started reading reports about the COVID-19 outbreak. I don’t think any of us could have imagined at the time how consuming it would be.” How is going to take over our lives and what will each of us do because I can’t imagine there’s actually anyone whose life hasn’t been affected by some form of COVID,” he added.
Jaishankar also talked about the lessons of globalization in response to the epidemic.
“On the one hand, the globalization of the world is evidenced by the nature of the way the pandemic itself spreads. The fact that we are all very dependent on one part of the global geography for our daily necessities,” he said.
“Now, it’s not like epidemics haven’t happened before. Something similar happened almost a century ago, and that was the Spanish flu. But the intensity of this epidemic, the speed with which it spread, the way it affected lives, it was really unprecedented. …..
“Now it also shows us all how important things are beyond national borders because we are dependent in different ways on various supplies from other parts of the world,” he added.
Mr. Jaishankar will pay an official visit to Singapore, the Philippines and Malaysia from March 23 to 27, 2024.
An earlier press release issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that the visit will focus on strengthening bilateral relations with the three countries and will provide opportunities to engage in regional issues of mutual concern.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
