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WOMAN 5 INTERVIEW
NOV 15 - NOV 28 2017
Website: www.asianlite.ae Email: newsdesk@asianlite.ae
for EXPO 2020. What will be India’s participation in EXPO 2020? We already announced that we will participate and we are currently engaged in substantial discussions with the EXPO 2020 team to identify a suitable plot, where we will have the India pavilion. The Department of Commerce from the Indian side has been designated as the nodal authority to coordinate Indian participation and the Federation of Indian Exports Organistion has been assigned the task of bringing together Indian companies that will showcase some of our strengths in EXPO 2020. UAE is going to celebrate 2018 as the Zayed legacy year. How are we going to join the celebrations? We work very closely with the Indian community here in the UAE to put together ideas for the year of giving and remembering the legacy of His Highness Sheikh Zayed. We have some really interesting archival material which speaks about his visits to India and his own passion for India. How he saw the relationship between a newly independent UAE and India with whom they had traditionally enjoyed a very many close ties. So we will be trying to build upon that legacy as we go forward. Over 2.3 million Indians are living in the UAE and what is your comment on the thriving Indian community in the UAE? Well I wouldn’t look at the Indian community in the UAE as a monolith of 2.3 or probably 2.7 million, I would look at them in three or four different categories. At one end nearly 70 % of the Indian community is broadly what you call blue collar and it is very important for us to make sure that we look after them. Frankly,
Ambassador Suri meeting with youngsters
a lot of our time goes to making sure that their requirements are understood, when they are in distress, we are able to assist them. We should have systems in place when they need legal assistance or medical assistance. If somebody falls ill, we even have systems in place to repatriate them back to India. If they lose a job, we give them a subsistence allowance. We have an Indian Community Welfare Fund to help Indians in distress, particularly at the lower end of the income spectrum. Then we have a vast number of Indian pro-
Ambassador Suri at Skill India pavillion
fessionals and today you see in Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah and elsewhere that, whether it the financial sector, whether it is the real estate sector, whether it is the other services industries, you see Indians at the top most positions and that is an extremely important resource. They are like a brain bank for India overseas and we work very closely with them. Some of them have excellent ideas, they have expertise for illuminating India’s development path. The third category is what you would call at the top end, the very entre-
Ambassador Suri honours Jawaher Saif Al Kumaiti
preneurial business community and there are conversations with them, really to see how we can work closely with them to increase investments into India. I am very pleased to say some of the business leaders from Abu Dhabi and Dubai have in fact invested significantly over the last few years whether you look at healthcare, you look at hospitality, you look at retail, you look at even some cases of manufacturing. So we work with the Indian business community to encourage their investments into India.
Ambassador Suri presents Diwali gifts
Ambassador Suri joining Onam festival
Celebrating Independence Day with Indian workers
Ambassador Suri at World Skill exhibition in Abu Dhabi