India-Russia co-chair 10th Working Group on Modernisation and Industrial Cooperation

India and Russia co-chaired the 10th session of the Working Group on Modernization and Industrial Cooperation on October 15.

The session was organised under the aegis of India-Russia inter-governmental Commission on Trade, Economic, Scientific, Technological and Cultural Cooperation (IRIGC-TEC).

Under the Strategic Partnership, several institutionalized dialogue mechanisms operate at both political and official levels to ensure regular interaction and follow-up on cooperation activities.

IRIGC-TEC guides the conduct of economic cooperation at the Governmental level. Thus, it serves as a mechanism for regularly monitoring bilateral progress across the sectors of trade and economic cooperation between India and Russia.

This was set up by an Agreement on the inter-governmental Commission on Trade, Economic, Scientific and Technological Cooperation signed in May 1992. The first session of IRIGC was held on 13 and 14 September 1994.

Since then the two countries have seen significant developments across diverse fronts. The developments were shared on the social media platform, X.

The Indian side saw representation from Amardeep Singh Bhatia, Secretary, Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT).

The Russian side saw representation from Alexey Gruzdev, Deputy Minister for Industry and Trade of the Russian Federation.

It was noted in the post that both the countries “shared progress on several pillars of economic cooperation and outlined the objectives for modernization and industrial cooperation in various sectors”.

Russia has been a longstanding and time-tested partner of India.

Since the signing of the “Declaration on the India-Russia Strategic Partnership” in 2000, India-Russia ties have seen heightened levels of cooperation in almost all areas, including political, security, defence, trade and economy, science & technology, culture, and people-to-people ties.

The two countries have a Special and Privileged Strategic Partnership.

With the recent visit of PM Modi to Russia in July earlier this year, Modi and Putin appreciated the work of IRIGC-TEC for ensuring further expansion and diversification of bilateral economic relations.