New UK trade and investment minister’s first overseas visit – to India, and Mumbai

The importance the British Government attaches to enhancing relations with India was underlined in March when Lord Green visited the country, including Mumbai.

Lord Green has just weeks ago taken on the position of Minister of Trade and Investment, and his first official overseas visit was to India.

Lord Green is well known to many of Mumbai’s top businesspeople as the former CEO and Chairman of HSBC for over five years, in which capacity he visited the commercial capital of India at least once a year. Indeed he reminded the audiences he spoke to in Mumbai that he has been coming to India for over 25 years.

So the Minister needed no introduction to many of India’s most senior business leaders when he called on them.  Much of the conversations were of a private nature about the companies’ plans for growth in the UK, but Lord Green underlined in all his calls how he believed that both the trade and investment relationship needed to be re-vitalised. One of his interlocutors said he thought there had been, until recently, a sense of “drift” in the business arena. Among the areas Lord Green highlighted for potential growth were automotive engineering, the creative industries, education and training, and infrastructure.

Lord Green had an opportunity to see how UK companies are making efforts to build business relationships in India. At a reception attended by about 150 Indian businesses he met both a trade delegation representing interests in the railway sector, which has huge potential across the country, and a group of SME’s, mainly from London, who were spending ten days at an Indian management school and meeting counter-parts in Mumbai.

During his two day visit Lord Green also had a chance to underline to the Reserve Bank of India, and a major conclave with over 100 senior bankers, the ways in which UK banks with branches here could help to open up and develop the rural economy – a prime objective for the RBI and the Indian Government.

Although there was no time to get outside Mumbai to see Indian agricultural and rural developments during his visit, Lord Green’s wife did take the opportunity to see how some UK-backed NGO’s are helping to raise people in Mumbai out of poverty and to try and enhance their standard of living. She visited Apnalya, an NGO set up years ago by a British woman Annabel Mehta, to support Mumbai’s poorest, eeking out an existence on dumpsites, as well as Muktangan , whose aims include  providing  teacher training in some of the inner-city communities.

Lord Green left all the Indian businesspeople  he met here in no doubt that he was committed in his new job to driving up British interest in India,  stimulating further investment into the UK, and looking for new opportunities to forge closer commercial ties. Visiting  Mumbai, and India, as his first destination on becoming Minister could not have sent a stronger message about the importance the former global head of one of Britain’s, and the world’s, largest banks, views the importance of this country.