India's partnership footprint is large and growing: EAM Jaishankar

New Delhi, May 30 (IANS) External Affairs Minister (EAM) S. Jaishankar on Friday said that the country’s partnership footprint is large and growing in various regions of the globe, and India’s neighbourhood has experienced this commitment to finding cooperative solutions more than any other region.

“Be it engineers in Zanzibar or ‘solar mamas’ in the Pacific, from vocational training to Information Technology, from improving tax systems to ensuring security, India’s partnership footprint is large and growing. It spans the exchanges of trainers and students to ensure distance education and virtual health training,” said EAM Jaishankar while addressing the Parul University Convocation in Gujarat’s Vadodara.

He said that India’s objective is to create capabilities on a sustainable basis in other societies, drawing on our experiences and learnings, adding that they can extend from the big to the small, from the complex to the obvious, from the creative to the routine.

“So, I urge you to recall the adage of giving a man a fish versus teaching him how to fish. We in India advocate the second, the lifetime solution. India’s neighbourhood has experienced this commitment to finding cooperative solutions more than any other region. The last decade has seen a real transformation in connectivity and contacts. There are power grids, fuel pipelines, roads, railways and waterways that could not have even been imagined a decade earlier,” he said.

The minister said that in every crisis, India has stood together in this region for collective well-being. “It could be vaccine supply during the COVID, or fuel and fertiliser supply after the Ukraine war, post-earthquake response and relief in Nepal and Myanmar or first responder endeavours in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Maldives,” he said.

Like in any grouping, EAM Jaishankar said that there obviously has to be a mutuality of benefits and respect for each other’s sensitivities.

“But given the turbulence that characterises our contemporary world, this willingness to stand by each other will only become more important with the passage of time,” he said.

He added that often, nations are confronted with natural disasters or even man-made situations that are beyond national capacities to cope.

“In such contingencies, the cooperative facet of world affairs comes to the fore. Relying on those more distant and less connected is no longer prudent. There is neither the same capability nor indeed the necessary empathy. India has certainly taken on much more responsibility in the last decade. It was visible when an earthquake recently struck Myanmar, or when conflict zone evacuations took place, such as in Ukraine, or in fact during the Sri Lankan economic crisis,” he said.

--IANS

dan/