Defence Minister Rajnath Singh and his Netherlands counterpart Brekelmans hold talks

Defence Minister Rajnath Singh held a meeting with his Netherlands counterpart Ruben Brekelmans in Delhi on Tuesday. Before the meeting, the two leaders shook hands and warmly greeted each other.

Brekelmans is on a visit to India to attend the Raisina Dialogue, which is underway in New Delhi from March 17. Raisina Dialogue 2025 is being hosted by the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) and Observer Research Foundation (ORF). It is India’s premier conference on geopolitics and geoeconomics committed to addressing the most challenging issues facing the global community.

Nearly 3,700 attendees and over 800 speakers and delegates from around 130 countries worldwide will attend the Raisina Dialogue. The participants include serving and former heads of state, ministers and lawmakers, diplomats, policy planners, military leaders, heads of multilateral institutions, business chiefs and eminent thinkers. The theme of this year’s Raisina Dialogue is “Kalachakra: People, Peace, Planet.”

Earlier this month, Netherlands Ambassador to India, Marisa Gerards, said that India and the Netherlands have a “very strong bilateral relationship.”

“We have a very strong bilateral relationship. We go back a long way. We were one of the first countries who recognised the independence of India. We have a lot of trade and investment,” she said.

Speaking to ANI, Gerards said that the Netherlands is 4th largest foreign investor in India, and 300 different Dutch companies are active here.

“We are the 4th investor in your country. About 300 different Dutch companies are very active. Also the other way around, we have quite some Indian companies who are also investing in the Netherlands. What we’re working on right now is a strategic partnership to see how we can do more on trade and investment. How we can do more on security, for example, but also do more on innovation and research, and then we have a wide range of different sectors where we work together like on water management, health, agriculture, very important on energy, ports and logistics and climate, and in all these different sectors, innovation and high tech research, it’s all key. And this is, I think, the overview, and it’s a very strong relationship,” she said.

However, Gerards still feels that there is a lot more to do. She said that they will do more work in the green energy sector.

“I think there’s a lot of room to do more. Green energy, green hydrogen is very high on our agenda as well. We’re also working together with the union government, but also here in Gujarat. We have quite some companies who are working in your ports, Port of Rotterdam, which is the gateway to Europe, the biggest port of our continent, is also very keen and very interested to see how we can do more in this area of green energy and green hydrogen as well,” she said.