Biswal said during her trip to India that she is keen to explore how DFC can support the goals and objectives of the US-India strategic partnership. Photo: Shutterstock
The US is keen to work with India to tackle some of the world’s most pressing issues, including health care, clean energy and climate change, a senior Biden administration official said.
The comments, made by Nisha Desai Biswal, deputy director of the US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC), were made ahead of her visit to India this week.
It is not so much about what India needs help with, but more about how the US and India are working together to address the issues, Biswal told PTI in an interview.
We have always said that if you don’t solve it in India, you can’t solve it for the world, Biswal said before leaving for India, her first visit to the country in four years and her first as deputy director of the DFC, a US development finance agency.
Her four-day trip to India begins on Tuesday.
She said there are several areas – such as climate change and tackling global warming and controlling greenhouse gas emissions, supporting a clean energy transition and addressing healthcare challenges – where the two countries can work together, as they did during the Covid pandemic.
India was a key partner not only in containing the pandemic as it spread within India, but also played a significant role in helping supply vaccines to control the pandemic globally, she said.
I think we need to think about it like this: What are the problems that we want to solve together?, Biswal said in response to a question.
Biswal said during her trip to India that she is keen to explore how DFC can support the goals and objectives of the US-India strategic partnership.
She said the DFC has invested huge amounts of money in India during the Biden administration.
India is our largest country that DFC is investing in. I think we have over $3.8 billion of active projects in India. Really $2.5 billion of that has come during the Biden administration and in key sectors like infrastructure, supporting manufacturing, health and vaccines and insulin, supporting India’s economic growth and access to capital. So just a very diverse range of areas that we’re working on in partnership with India, Biswal said.
DFC, she said, is deploying its financing in India to address climate and clean technology diversification.
She stressed that when thinking about the technologies of tomorrow, we do not want to be dependent on one country as a production centre for all those technologies.
“When we think about friend-shoring, India is at the top of the list of countries where we would like to see that diversification,” she said.
Biswal played a key role in India-US relations as Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia and later as head of the US India Business Council.
“As someone who closely follows and is active in the US-India relationship and really believes in it, I must say I am very happy to see how much closer the US-India ties are and how broad they are,” said the India-born Biswal.
Broadly based in terms of the broad support and recognition in both countries that we are each other’s most important partners, but also broadly based in the areas where the US and India work together geographically and sectorally. It’s just breathtaking. It’s just really exciting to see, she said in response to a question.
The Biden administration’s top official said India’s innovation in research and technology is growing by leaps and bounds.
You see Indian progress in space exploration, breakthroughs in health and pharmaceuticals, in every area of human endeavor, India has made tremendous progress. For the United States, it is fundamental that we can work with and support all of these advances within India, because they not only benefit India and the Indian people, but they really create greater benefit globally, she said.
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First publication: 08 Sep 2024 | 11:29 am IST