Bali, Nov 17: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh today arrived here on a three-day visit to Indonesia with an aim of deepening India's ties with East Asia at a time when the US and Europe are facing economic crisis.
Singh will attend the India-ASEAN Summit and East Asia Summit here with a focus on enhancing trade and investment, connectivity and capacity-building besides discussing security issues.
On the sidelines of these Summits, he will have bilateral meetings with US President Barack Obama and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao.
In the second leg of the two-nation tour, Singh will travel to Singapore on a bilateral visit. “Partnership with ASEAN is an essential component of our ‘Look East' policy,” the Prime Minister said in his departure statement in New Delhi.
He noted that the level of India's engagement with the ASEAN (Association of South East Asian Nations) as a group and with individual ASEAN member states has gone up qualitatively in the last few years.
“This is reflected in the areas of trade and investment, capacity-building, connectivity, people-to-people and institutional linkages,” Singh said.
He said an ambitious India-ASEAN Plan of Action for 2010-2015 has been agreed upon and “I will review the implementation of the Plan of Action with the ASEAN leaders.”
Next year, India will host the India-ASEAN Summit for the first time to commemorate 20 years of dialogue partnership with ASEAN, Singh pointed out.
“I will have the opportunity to share our ideas for the Commemorative Summit with ASEAN leaders in Bali.”
